What makes it True?
by Chris Kenworthy
Summary: During Spring break, Alex and Liz start to spend more time alone together - exploring Frazier woods, working on English assignments - and find themselves falling into a love affair that neither expected.
1. Chapter 1

I tried to force a smile onto my face as I walked among the trees. It stuck for about three seconds before beginning to slip away at the edges.

"Come on, Alex!" I told myself in a low mutter. "It's a beautiful spring day, warm and sunny. The woods are bursting with new life all around you. Is it too friggin' much to ask to be able to forget about her for five minutes?"

There was no answer forthcoming to that question of course. (If there had been, I would probably have started to wonder if I were going crazy.) So I just kept on walking through Frazier woods, my mood growing with each step slightly morose.

Finally I arrived at this immediate destination of this journey - a small, pretty clearing in the woods dominated by a waterfall where the Chavez creek jumped off a rocky ridge eleven feet high, to land in a swirly pool and then, as if it were late for meeting with a creek two miles down the way, rushed on southwards and through a dense thicket of cedar. I had good memories of this place, going back a long time, and it seemed like a good place to try and sort out the second verse of this sad song I was trying to write.

So I unslung the accoustic guitar from my back, (carrying it hadn't really helped my mood on the way there,) found a rock about the right height and flat enough to sit on, and quickly tuned up. Once that was done, I sang and played everything I had of the song so far, and started doing what I usually do when I'm trying to write lyrics a song - throwing in anything at all, whatever I can think of, and hoping that there's something that fits and that I like. I can't really remember much of what I tried that day, though one really bad attempt does stick out in my mind - "I gave you my heart, I offered my love. Is it callous to think, that you'd rather have fluff?"

Because I was making so much noise myself, I only heard the footsteps about a second before their owner appeared - and I probably wouldn't even have had that much warning if I hadn't stopped playing for a moment to think of what I was going to try next. For a moment I was upset. This was a very private place... what did someone else think they were doing, bugging me here? They would have heard some of what I was playing!

Then I saw the face of the interloper, and the frustration melted away. For one thing, this person had equal rights to think of this places as 'hers' as I thought of it as mine. (If there was someone else who had discovered the clearing independently, but I didn't know of it because we were never there at the same times, would they have equal rights too?) For a second thing, I could very rarely stay upset at Liz Parker for long, no matter what the provocation was - with one noticeable exception in the history of our friendship.

She smiled at me and hurried over - dressed in a way that suggested strong faith in the warmth of the weather - denim shorts, a bright red t-shirt, and sandals. No jewelry, not even earrings or a single finger ring. "Hey hey stranger, fancy meeting you here."

"I could say the same, I guess." I admitted. "Guess we both had the same idea for how to spend the first day of March break - or at least, for where to spend it. Since you didn't bring a guitar, and I don't think you expected me to be here so you could borrow mine."

Liz laughed. "No, Alex, you know that I don't sing or play. The music you were making as I came up the path sounded... well, angsty, but good in a bittersweet way."

"It's not nearly done yet," I disclaimed. "So, what did you come up to the old clearing for? Just hang around and, erm... not read a book since you haven't got one." Actually, she was carrying a little bundle in a grocery bag, and there could have been a book in there, but somehow it didn't seem so. Actually, I wasn't sure what she had in the bag. "Just sit here and enjoy nature?"

"Actually..." Liz blushed a little. "I was seized with the idea of taking a swim. The water's probably very cold, but I don't think I mind that horribly."

My rock was very close to the edge of the pool, close enough that I could reach out and dip my fingers in, so I did just that. "Doesn't seem so bad. Cool, maybe even somewhere between cool and cold, but no worse than that. Of course, it'll probably feel colder when you're entirely immersed in it."

"Yeah, I would expect so," Liz replied, shifting from one foot to another a little anxiously. I looked speculatively at her for a long moment.

"So, what, are you nervous about stripping down to your swimsuit just because I'm here?" I teased her.

"How do you know I've got it on under my casual clothes?" she replied.

"Umm..." That mental image had me wordless for a long moment. "Umm... because it's just good preparation, and you always seem to be well prepared. Why risk having to get naked in the middle of the forest just to put a swimsuit on, when you can wear it like underwear and avoid a potentially embarassing situation."

She smiled slightly. "I guess you know me well," she agreed. "And yes, I do feel a little awkward about it now that I know you're here. Darned if I can figure out exactly why... I mean, _other_ than the mere fact that you're still a guy."

"Umm, yeah, have been all along - at least as far as I know," I joked.

"Yes, of course you have been, but..."

"I know, I know," I filled in. "Because I've been best friends with you and Maria for so long, you kind of feel like I'm 'just one of the girls' most of the time - except when the testosterone implications of a situation are just too blatant to be ignored."

"Umm, err..." Liz didn't seem to have a quick comeback for that.

"Hmm... how about if I strip down and get into the water first?" I asked, a big grin on my face. "I didn't wear a swimsuit under my outfit, but I've got fairly thick and baggy boxers on, and that seems about as good as wearing swimming trunks." Liz was still speechless so, feeling daring, I put my instrument aaside, shrugged off my one big blue t-shirt with the sleeves almost down to my elbows, kicked away shoes, and undid the snap and zipper on my jeans. It wasn't long before I was wearing only the aforementioned hawaiian print boxer shorts, and stepping into the chill watter. "Yikes that's... comfortable," I mugged, and fell gently among the cold waves of my own entrance.

I poked my head back up above the water a few seconds later, crab-walking backwards away from the edge. Liz was giggling and shaking her head. "Are you quite through with your antics?"

"Umm... yeah," I agreed. "Now it's your turn." She still seemed to hesitate. "Come on - after I went through all that you _have_ to come in too!"

Liz sighed, but she was smiling, and slowly, carefully, slipped off her sandals first. Then she undid the three buttons on her shorts, slipping them down her long, smooth legs - yikes, where did that particular thought come from? Sure, I've known for a while that Liz was cute, but...

I tried to concentrate on the fact that Liz was one of my best friends as she folded the shorts twice and set them next to her shoes, and then slipped out of her shirt, wearing nothing but a black two-piece bikini swimsuit - nothing scandalous or limit-pushing, but it defintely showed off her lithe, compact figure very well. Yikes, that was another not-good thought to be having about my best friend.

But Liz just smiled as if she were entirely unaware of what I was thinking, and stepped into the pool herself. "So, is there a particular reason why you're trying to come up with really angsty lyrics for songs?" she asked softly.

"Oh, only the usual," I mumbled. "Isabel... and Grant."

"Oh, right," she said, letting out a low sigh. Isabel and Grant Sorenson had started seeing each other back in January, while I was still in Sweden, and the fact that his extensive experience with the Frazier Woods groundwaters had helpd Izzy and the other aliens find and defeat the Gandarium queen, (though Grant didn't know about any of that side of things, or exactly what he was helping her with,) had apparently only made the two of them closer as a couple.

"Yeah, that's rough," Liz mumbled. "I have to say, it looks like she's being foolish and shallow. Grant may hit a lot of superficial hot buttons... tall, dark, handsome, sophisticated, suave - but he isn't a good match for her. Not like someone else I could mention."

"Well, thanks." I sidestroked lazily through the water, reflecting that Liz's sentiments didn't really help me out with Isabel. She wouldn't exactly listen to either of us - she'd made that fact powerfully clear already. "So how are things going between you and Max, or shouldn't I even ask?"

"Maybe better not," she replied with a long sigh. "Max seems to be caught up in a big love triangle mess with Tess and Kyle, and I've resolved to stay well clear until after he's extricated himself. Maybe longer."

I blinked, which somehow managed to throw a few droplets of water back onto my eyes. "Are you serious? What, does she get to take her pick or something?"

"I don't really know," Liz muttered. "If you really want the recap as far as I know it..." I'm not sure if I nodded or not, but she continued. "Tess and Max have been spending more time together since we got back from Vegas, though he said it was just as friends, nothing more. But Kyle started really flirting with Tess when Max was around, and she flirted back, and Max realized he was jealous about it. And he told Tess that he was jealous of Kyle, and wasn't quite sure what that meant. That's pretty much it."

"Hmmm..." I weighed the evidence that had been presented. "Tough call there... you might be getting upset over nothing much, or you might have caught an early sign of Max/Tess hookupage. " A pause. "Do you want me to touch base with Max sometime and get his take on the situation?"

"Umm... that'd be entirely up to you. Personally, I think a break from thinking and worrying about Max would do me good anyway," Liz decided.

"Alright, so. Ummm... any idea what else we can talk about then?"

Liz turned around and started to swim along the far side of the small pond. "Not really sure." She looked over at me, her hair trailing in a slightly unusual way because the bottom ends of it were wet and the root halves were still dry. "Was just thinking about how we originally found this place."

Ah, right. The woods had always been a little bit special to Liz and me... it was where we met, well, the place we really first met and talked, as opposed to vaguely seeing each other at school. I'd been playing make-believe knights of the round table, and looking for a dragon to slay. Liz had been watching some tiny little tree lizards, because she liked them, and her science teacher had said she could do an extra credit assignment by observing lizard behavior in their natural habitat and writing up some notes. As you might imagine, sparks flew quickly, when I thought that Liz's lizards would make good, if slightly small, dragons to slay.

It had been several months later when we'd been exploring together, after becoming good friends, and had first found this glade. The river had only been a trickle in mid-fall, without much rain that year to feed it, but it had been pretty, and quickly become our special place. "Yeah, that was cool," I agreed. And then couldn't really think of anything else to follow it with.

"At least Michael and Maria seem to be doing pretty well together this spring," Liz lamented. "The rest of us seem to have our love lives in permanent disarray." I sighed, not really wanting to contribute anything, since I didn't want to remind Liz about Max any more than she had reminded herself, or to get on a roll about Isabel. But I agreed with her all too well, and there didn't seem to be anything more that needed to be said.

"Oh... did you get a killer assignment for English lit too?" I asked suddenly. Liz was in a different class period than I was for literature, she was in sixth while I was in first, but we were both taking the advanced placement classes with Mrs Batterson, and a lot of the time we'd discovered she'd assigned the same homework questions to both groups, though she'd apparently learned not to give them pop quizzes on the same days if she wanted it to still be a surprise in the afternoon. In fact, she seemed to take a slightly sadistic pleasaure in giving one group a pop quiz, and then letting the other sweat it out, expecting that their turn would come over the next few days, before finally managing to announce the test right when at least half of the students were not expecting it.

"Yeah, I can't believe it." Liz groaned. "Fifteen pages on the lost Shakesperean sonnets? Come on, this is our _spring BREAK_, lady! If it was up to me, I'd lose those sonnets all over again."

I laughed in appreciation of that. "Want to try tackling it together some night? We can't exactly hand in the same paper, but I'd appreciate being able to bounce a few ideas off you with my thesis and strategy." Battleson... oops, I meant Batterson, seldom allowed any team pairings in assignments, and when she did, they _always_ had to be two people from the same class grouping. I'd gotten into a big clash with her earlier about wanting to work with Liz. And this time... actually, I couldn't quite remember whether she'd said that team projects could be submitted this time. I wasn't really paying attention, because there wasn't anybody in the morning class I particularly wanted to work with.

"Yeah, cool!" Liz agreed enthusiastically. Then, about ten seconds later she added, "Ehh, this water is too cold to stay in for long. I've gotten chilled enough that my unnatural obsession with swimming has worn off. What about you?"

"Ehh." I could go either way, in point of fact, but if Liz didn't want to stay in, then swimming didn't have much more appeal for me. "After you."

"No, I insist," she said, smirking. "After you."

I thought about pushing the issue back, then decided that it really wasn't worth the effort. I climbed out, stood dripping in the clearing for a second - and then realized that I didn't have a towel or anything. Perils of being impulsive I suppose. "You don't happen to have an extra swimming towel in that bag, do you?"

"Nah, sorry mister underpants." Liz had gotten out of the water right behind me, and was already wrapping a white towel around her bikini-ed body... and that hormonal, disreputable part of my brain was very disappointed that it hadn't gotten another good long look at her figure. "Only one, and I need it. You shoulda thought about that before you stripped down and headed into the water."

"Mmm, yeah." Somewhat sourly, I sat back down on my rock, thought for a second about putting my t-shirt back on top of wet skin. It would cling in a slightly irritating way, but dry off before long, since the day was warm and breezy. On the other hand... I decided not to, and to stay in my boxers, just to see what Liz's reaction to that would be. She pretended not to notice, at least at first.

"Have you spoken to Maria much lately?" I asked casually.

"Umm... I guess not that much. We chat about stuff a little whenever we're both on shift, naturally. Why?"

"Oh, no particular reason. I was just thinking that I hadn't seen her around much lately."

"She's been hanging out a lot at Michael's, I think," Liz said. My eyebrows raised a bit. "And, if you're about to ask anything to do with what they're doing over there - I don't know, and I don't think I really want to know."

"Well, I wanna know," I said, mugging the line slightly. "I'm Maria's friend and I have a right to know!"

Liz giggled. "Fine. You're Maria's friend, so you can find her and ask her!" The look on my face may have been impressive, because she burst out laughing again.

Another pause. "I've been thinking of getting a job myself. You know... like the three of you working at the Crashdown, or... well, or someone we both know at the UFO center." It occured to me too late, that if I'd actually said Max's name I'd probably have drawn less attention to him.

"About damn time," Liz burst out. "You've avoided joining us working-class shmoes for too long. Who do oyu think you are to be so high and mighty anyway?"

I laughed softly. "Oh, nobody special." A pause. "Any idea where I should be looking?"

"Well, we don't really need any extra help, though you could check back again around the start of June, since that's when tourist season picks up a little. Something to do with how the original crash was in mid-summer, I guess, brings the flying saucer nuts out around then."

"Hmm... okay, I'll bear that in mind, thanks," I told her.

Liz sighed agreeably. She'd sat down on the clearing floor, arranging the towel in such a way that it stayed between her tender butt and the ground. Now she fiddled nervously with her dropped clothes, hesitated for just a moment, and then shrugged partway out of the towel, so that she could use the top part of it to dry off her arms, and take some of the moisture away from the wet portion of her hair. She shot a look at me as she stood up again, and for a second I couldn't decide if the point of that look was to find out if I was staring at her, (which I only half was, at most,) or to cast a semi-appreciative look down my own nearly naked body. Oh, come on, that had to be my imagination running wild... didn't it?

Soon she had efficiently dried off her legs too, and put all four articles of clothing back on. "So... got anything you can play me on the guitar?" she asked lazily. "Something that isn't unfinished at this moment, maybe?"

I grinned. "Maybe on or two pieces... but I don't think I want to get the guitar wet."

Liz sighed, examined her towel critically as if to see if it had any worthwhile drying power left, and held it up to me with a questioning look in her eyes. I shrugged, nodded, and she tossed it over. Quickly I rubbed down the parts of my skin that the guitar could generally be expected to make contact with, trying not to think about how this same towel just a minute ago been caressing Liz's young, supple flesh... Okay now seriously, buddy, cut that out! Sheesh, what's with you today?

I picked the guitar up and concentrated on playing a familiar melody. That came easily enough, and a few measures after the guitar line, the words arrived.

"Rainbow fire, burning through the sky.

Rainbow fire, magic to the eye.

Rainbow fire, burning through the sky.

Rainbow fire, if only I could fly.

Dark night, cold wind, too far north.

Empty field, starlight, and the fog steals my breath.

Dark night, northern light, aurora flying forth.

Emptiness and beauty, as startling as death.

Rainbow fire, burning through the sky...

Pretty girl, blond hair, reaches for my hand.

Scarves down, winter's kiss, Heart beats like a gong.

Pretty girl, phone call, 'Hope you understand.'

Desert night, not right, What did I do wrong?

Rainbow fire..."

"Wow," Liz muttered once the final chord had died away. "That was... that was about Sweden, and Leanna, right?" I sighed and nodded, just slightly. "She called and cut you loose?"

"Yeah. Probably we were both deluding ourselves to think that a long distance relationship over three thousand miles, two countries, and one ocean could ever possibly work. Two weeks ago, she met someone new. He's dutch, and his family just moved to Upsalla."

"Sorry to hear," Liz mentioned. She sighed and looked around. "I'm feeling a little bored - not used to being on break I guess. Wanna play competitve life in the dirt?"

I blinked. "The game of life I'm familiar with, the Conway one... but **competitve** life? And doing it by drawing in the dirt?"

"Umm... yeah," Liz sighed. "Maybe not the best idea... the game of life program on my Dad's computer has a competitive mode. All the spots belong to one player... colored blue or brown, generally. All spots that stay alive keep their old colors, and every new spot that is born has to be generated based on three other spots next to it, so it assumes the majority color. Two or three of those parent spots have to be the same color. With me so far?"

"Umm... yeah, except how do the players actually make moves or control anything in the game?" I asked. "Life proceeds without human interference."

"I was just **getting** to that," she said with a touch of testyness. "Let's say I'm blue and you're brown, for the sake of an example. When I take my move, I set one new blue spot, somewhere empty, and erase one of your browns. Then the pattern goes through a regular generation. Then you take your turn similarly, making a new brown, and clearing out a blue, and another generation, and so on. Whoever wipes out the enemy's color first wins."

"Intriguing... a square of four would be a highly defensible pattern," I realized. "Because three out of a square would regenerate the fourth, the enemy wouldn't be able to directly wipe out a square by clearing."

"Yep. Although you can try putting one of your own up to an enemy square and seeing what happens to it as new interactions are created," Liz replied, smiling. "If I have two or three in a shared square, I can increase my ownership, given a move, by clearing out one of your spots and letting them regenerate with my color."

"Sounds like a lot of fun," I said, "but I don't want to try it without a computer I think. Would get too confusing, **too** fast. Just figuring out how to do generation patterns, keeping two different varieties of spot separate, in the dirt with sticks... we'd get into arguments about whether a spot had been cleared out by mistake, and find it hard to establish conclusively what the pattern had been before we started making the changes."

"Yeah, I guess that's true," Liz admitted, sighing.

"We could do a simpler drawing game though," I suggested. "Sprouts, or lines and boxes."

"Hmm..." Liz thought about that. "Lines and boxes is a 'maybe.' What's Sprouts?"

"Oh, you haven't heard of that one?" I grinned. "We start by drawing a certain number of dots on the ground. Each player, in their turn, draws a line, starting at a dot, and ending at a dot, not crossing any other lines or going **through** any other dots. You can't start or end your line at a dot that already has three different line segments leading from or to it. Once you've drawn your line, you put another dot somewhere along it. If there isn't any way to make a legal move when it's your turn, you lose."

"Hmm." Liz thought about that. "That's it? Doesn't sound very... hmm. Well, I guess we can give it a try. How do we decide how many dots to start with? I guess the more of them there are, the longer the game might go."

"Yeah," I replied. "Since you're new to the game, why don't you pick the number of dots and who gets to go first... don't draw more than five though."

"Hmmm." Liz picked up a stick, found a fairly clear section of slightly dusty ground, and marked three round dots, in an equal triangle formation. "You can go first."

"Alright." I fetched a stick of my own, trying to remember what I could about the strategy for this game. Well, it didn't seem to matter much for the first move... I joined the two nearest dots with a straight line, 'sprouting' an extra dot right in the middle of the line. Liz made a similar move between two of the original dots, one of the ones I'd used and the one that I hadn't. There was now a wedge of five dots connected by two straight lines.

I connected up the two mid-points with another straight line, putting my new dot close to Liz's first line. Liz drew in the third side of her original triangle formation, marking close to my 'side' of the figure for her new sprout. (Where you put your sprout on the line, or how you curved it, didn't really matter that much for the strategy of the game, just for convenience in drawing.)

I stared... the situation had got more complicated now, and we were moving into the end-game, but I wasn't quite sure of the right move to make. There were seven sprouts now, two of which were 'dead', having already had three lines connecting them. They were the ones that Liz and I had made on our first moves, and I had connected on my second - being born off of a line automatically used up two of a sprout's three lives.

That was the key. There were five live spots now, each with only one 'lifeline' left. Each move would decrease this by one. If we both moved simply, then after one interchange there would be three, and then one... and I would lose, because there could be no legal move with only one live sprout.

But it was possible, even easy, to strand sprouts so that they could not interconnect. I could do that now, altering the parity, but Liz might then do it back to me, and things could get tricky. I decided to move simply, drawing a second, arcing, connection between my two original sprouts. Liz paused, and then drew a connection between the sprout on the internal strut of the triangle with her far corner sprout. (I'll try to attach some pictures to make the game play easier to follow, in case anyone cares.)

And suddenly I realized that I couldn't help winning! There were three live sprouts left - one within the triangle, one outside, and one on the edge. The first two were completely unable to connect with each other, but the third could still connect with either of them. Whichever way it went, the newly sprouted dot would be seperated from the last live one. I drew a connection outside the triangle, a hugely arcing loop, and let Liz figure out that she had lost.

It only took her a few seconds, and her face quirked with annoyance. "Okay... I see how there's a little surprising subtlety in here. A lot if it is just driven by the numbers, but there's some freaky topological action in there too." She sighed, examining the final playing diagram as if reconstructing the play... which she probably was. "Okay, let's see if I can figure out where I went wrong. On my last move..." she scuffed some lines and dots back out of the figure, then doodled vaguely with the design for a moment. "Can't see any way I could save myself with that. Maybe if I roll it back further... I shouldn't have completed the triangle figure, maybe... but if I didn't -" She made a different line for her second move, connecting the apex and the mid-bar of the 'A' formation that had existed back then, "you could still complete the triangular perimeter in your turn, and then I don't see how I'm any better off."

"There's a definite disadvantage to playing first or second in certain circumstances on a given number of dots," I said. "Given mathematically perfect play, someone has to win and someone else lose, after all. Not sure that I'd have wanted to go second on three dots."

Liz considered that, and then scuffed over the whole diagram. "Well, maybe we'll try that again, but not right now." She looked up at me. "You gonna put your clothes back on at this point? I think you've had time enough to drip dry pretty well."

I jumped slightly, put a hand on my arm, and realized that she was right - I'd nearly finished drying off. Shrugging, I went back to my own things and put them back on. "Want to head back into town now?"

"Sure I guess." Liz sighed. "You got a car nearby?"

"Yeah, down the trail a ways. You?"

"Nah, my mom dropped me off on her way out to Riverside. I brought a little change, in case I had to get the four thirty shuttle bus from the Ranger's station." She grinned and headed to the edge of the clearing. "After you?"

#

I drove up the main highway past the city limits, through the west side of town, silently. Neither of us had said a word since leaving the forest. Finally I blurted out, "Any idea where we're going?"

"Umm... no, not at the moment," Liz replied, laughing quietly. "Let see... we could just go to the Crash."

"Do you have a shift today?"

"Nah... I'm not on much this week, actually. Maria and some of the other waitresses in high school wanted to load up on their hours, and I kinda felt like just relaxing and taking the time off, so..." She shrugged. "Got the afternoon gig tomorrow, though."

"Well, I suppose we could go and work on that Lit assignment," I mumbled. "But I have to admit I don't really feel like tackling **that** today either."

"No," Liz agreed. "Just sit down in the dining room and have a snack, hang out?"

"That's tempting," I admitted. "Or... oh, how about we go catch a movie? Just head out to the Western cinema and go to whatever's in theater 4?"

"It could be asking for trouble," she warned.

"Really? Like what?"

"Umm... nah, I'd rather not say. Let's go. Either it'll be okay, or blindingly obvious what I meant, and I can just say 'I told you so.'"

I shrugged, and drove over to the old movie house. Parked the car, looked up at the marguee sign they had above the box office... and flinched. "Do you see what I mean?" Liz muttered with a smirk.

Theater four was showing 'Against the Rules', an R-rated thriller-drama that had stuck in my mind because every review seemed to mention the steamy love scenes. Liz was right... this plan of mine might have its drawbacks - but I was just stubborn enough, (or crazy enough,) to want to see it through.

"Okay, yeah, maybe not the safest choice, or the one that either of us would have picked if we'd had our own choice," I admitted. "Are you chicken to go in there with me?"

"Alex! It's... it's not a question of being chicken, it's just... um, okay, I have to admit I don't know what it's just. Kinda weird. Like I were going in there with a brother... or with my Dad."

"Oh, gee, thanks. Love hearing that."

"You... do you know what I mean?"

"Umm... maybe a little," I admitted. "But come on. It's supposed to be a pretty good movie, after all, and we're both here."

"Do you realize that we're probably going to be... um, well... probably the only people in the audience who won't be either making out hot and heavy, or, umm... taking care of business by themselves?"

"Umm... I think you're overstating the case a little," I mumbled. "But it'd be interesting to see if you're not!"

I guess that Liz couldn't come up with another reason why not at that point.

The movie **was** good... on several levels. The plot was entertaining without being too light or insubstantial, the score and the camera work in places were frankly beautiful... and the love scenes were definitely impressive in their own way. I feel that I'm on pretty firm ground that Liz's prediction did not actually come to pass, having made a point to look around the theater at a few key moments.

Yes, there were couples (and one threesome,) who were necking, or fondling, or maybe even going further around us in the theater. Maybe one or two people sitting by themselves who definitely seemed to be mast... mastering their own domain, and I guess there might have been others who were so subtle about it that I couldn't tell. But there were definitely a number of couples and groups who were just paying attention to the flick.

Somehow, the whole situation started to make me think. About how sick and tired I was of waiting for Isabel to stop making other people a priority, and that it was a shame Liz and Max seemed to be in a messy situation too. About the unexpected rush of hormones I'd felt seeing Liz in her swimsuit, and everything else that had happened between us today in the woods. I even caught my mind drifting back to a time when I'd hoped that Liz and I could become more than friends, before Isabel Evans ever looked twice in my direction.

But then the plot of the film drew me back in again, and pretty soon it was over and the two of us were caught up in the tide of people leaving the building. I got back into the car, put on a smile, and turned to Liz. "_now_ back to the Crashdown for munchies?"

She laughed. "Sure."

#

Somehow along the way back, I started talking about Sweden again, and some of the big corporate headquarters in Uppsala that I had gotten to visit while I was there, like Pfizer, the multinational pill maker, (which wasn't that interesting,) and mySql, which really was pretty cool. They develop a computer database system, one of the four most widely used relational database systems in the world maybe, and the only one that's open-source and will work on just about any operating system. (Microsoft makes two of the others, in case you were wondering.) I'd actually rigged up a mySql instance on my linux desktop system last summer, just to mess around with it, and the school uses it too, mostly because it's free. When Mister Olson found out how interested I was in computers and that sort of thing, he managed to get me in for a tour at the new development wing of the facility, like the team that was working on trying to give their system stored procedure support, which is one of the features that the big guys have and they don't - yet.

Of course, I completely missed for about five muntes that Liz was nearly bored to tears by the database talk, because I was so excited talking about it that I wasn't paying enough attention to her. Whoops.

But once I **did** clue in, I forced myself to stop talking, focus on eating my alien probes... (after commenting to Liz that they really needed to come up with a slightly less gross theme name for the chicken fingers,) and Liz chatted about this biochemistry internship/scholarship project that she'd been working on. Apparently, someone was building a new factory just outside of town, and they were running this charity thing to get some goodwill from the townsfolk, probably as advance PR to store up against any charges that they were ruining the local environment or treating workers unfairly or whatever.

Liz went up to get our desserts ourselves, since our waitress seemed to have gone on break and the other girl on duty, Sarah, was trying to deal with about eleven customers at once. When she came back, I noticed that in addition to my fudge blastoff and her saturn's moon pie, she had a big grin on her face, two pencils, and a few sheets of paper. "Want to give me another try at sprouts? I think I've got a possible strategy - oh, and maybe even a way of evening up the odds, since you say that normally based on the number of initial dots, and who goes first, one player or the other generally has an advantage?"

I grinned. "Okay, what's your equalizer system?"

"The player who's fighting uphill gets a number of 'vetos' - say, two. Anybody who's facing somebody with vetoes has to specify their move in advance, and can only make it if it doesn't get vetoed."

"Okay... how do you tell if a move is substantially different though? I could arc from points A to B on the left or on the right, that doesn't necessarily make them different moves though."

Liz thought about that. "In general, the next move proposed can't be between the same two dots... although the player proposing a move can attempt to make an argument why it's a completely different move... if he's moving on another side of a line segment, or looping completely around a structure that he didn't loop completely around before, say."

"And if you veto a move, then I do something different, you play, and my originally vetoed move is still available, I can do it then right? Unless you have a second veto you want to waste on it," Liz nodded. "Alright, let's try it then. Three to start, I go first, and you have two vetoes."

"Make the three then," Liz urged, putting a sheet of paper between our desserts and handing me a pencil.

I did, and then pointed to two of the starting sprouts. "From A to B, as before." Liz nodded approval, of course, (since I could have made a practically equivalent move even if she'd burned both her vetoes here,) and I made the move. Liz smiled, and connected the third dot, with a big loop, to itself. A-ha.

With two of that third point's lives taken, it couldn't be used to form the main triangle. The basic strategy of this variant was becoming clear. I had to seperate live sprouts into exactly two different regions, inaccessible to each other, to win. (Or four, but that seemed like it would be incredibly difficult.) Liz had either to get them seperated into three, or keep them all together in one. I saw a possible opening, and smiled cautiously. "From here to here, within the loop," I proposed, indicating the two sprouts on the loop Liz had just made. That would trap one live sprout entirely within the loop, forever unplayable.

"Veto," Liz decided, shaking her head - as I had known she would. Now, then... if I couldn't build the original triangular perimeter, maybe I could attempt to establish a square one, using one side of Liz's loop - and the line that I had drawn on my first move. Using two lines to connect them up...

"Alright, here to here." That was one of the ends of my line, to the newest sprout on Liz's loop. She looked unhappy for a moment, seeing what I was doing, but realized that, again, she couldn't burn her last veto here or I'd just do the same thing on the other side. So she nodded, and I made the move, drawing a new sprout. And then she connected up the sprout on the other end of the loop, the one she had started the loop from, to my newest sprout, with a slightly curvy, slightly diagonal line. That would keep me from executing my original plan.

Still, there were all kinds of ways to make a large perimeter now, and Liz couldn't block all of them. I indicated the only original point that still only had one line connecting to it, and Liz's newest sprout, along a mostly-straight path, and she paused, considered, and nodded her agreement. Now, the entire mess with Liz's original loop was entirely dead, and the only four points that were still in play were on the loop I had just formed - two of the original sprouts, the one I had marked between them on my first play, and the new sprout that I had just marked. Each of them had only one life left, and Liz still had a veto. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

I still needed to seperate live sprouts into two segments... possibly inside and outside of this loop, or using smaller loops that had yet to be made. If it weren't for that veto, I was sure that I'd be able to do it, but...

Liz, after pondering the position for a long time, made a move, connecting the two outermost of those four sporuts, inside the big loop. Now there was a slightly smaller loop, with three... and two of them had a different sector outside than the third, so that they could only be connected within.

The bad feeling intensifying, I gamely pointed to the two sprouts that could be connected outside, and made a little curve outside to show what I wanted to do. "I'd-a like you to meet a friend of mine," Liz said in a really bad Italian accent. "His name's Corleone - Vito Corleone." And a big grin.

Alright, that was her last veto, but the damage was done. I connected one of those dots to the third, inside the loop, made a new sprout, and Liz connected that to the second. The new sprout she made was the only one alive. No way for me to make a move.

"Alright... well played," I admitted. "Especially with the veto husbandry."

"Thanks." We attacked our desserts with more vigor at that point, idly deconstructing the play a little bit, trying to figure out if I could have thought up a strategy that would have let me prevail against the vetos. Then Liz got up out of her booth, yawned, and stretched tremendously high up for such a short girl.

"Well, I think that's a night for me." I walked her into the back room, feeling... feeling more than a little odd about the whole time I'd spent with Liz today.

"So... we gonna actually tackle the sonnets stuff any tomorrow?" I asked without too much enthusiasm.

"Umm... sure I guess. Come by and knock on the upstairs door a little past one in the afternoon?"

"Sure." Liz headed up to her apartment, and I slipped out the side door and went over to my car.


	2. Chapter 2

I woke up that morning and tried to remember if I had had a dream, durning the night.

It nagged at me for a little while, as I lay there in bed. Something about... about a room, a dark enclosed space. And a pretty girl with dark hair and a bright smile... yeah, it was Liz. We were... we'd been looking for something? No, we'd been _hiding_ for someone, and scrambled into a dark place underground. And at the end of the dream, she'd kissed me. Or I'd kissed her.

Okay... this was starting to turn into a little bit of an obsession with Liz Parker, I realized as I got up and started looking for clothes to put on after having my shower. And, come to think of it... was that stuff _really_ from a dream? Or was it just a fantasy that I'd made up on the spot, because I'd **wanted** to have a dream like that? Hmm... it was a little hard to tell sometimes.

Going into the bathroom, I decided to actually run a bath instead of taking a shower. It was sunday morning, and I didn't really have anything to do until one pm, and somehow having a bath seemed like a really cool idea. (There isn't anything less than manly about that, is there? I mean, it's not like I put bubble bath solution into the water or anything. Just a nice hot bath, running a little water into the overflow now and then to keep things fresh.)

After bathing, drying, and getting dressed, I sloped off downstairs. Nobody was around - Mom and Dad must have left for church nearly an hour before. We got into some big arguments about church last year... Mom and Dad really believe in God and the Lord Jesus and all that, and I'm not so sure myself. Finally my mom gave up trying to push me into it, and I come along once every month or two to keep her happy, and on special holidays like Christmas and Easter and a few others. But a lot of times the preacher just strikes me as a holier-than-thou SOB who interprets the word of the Lord to satisfy his own preconceptions rather than admit there's something he doesn't know about the world...

Sorry, I didn't mean to get off on a big ramble there. Empty house, nobody around. That's really all I was meaning to say. Kinda felt like a big fancy breakfast... well, to be specific, I was in the mood for _eating_ a big fancy breakfast, not cooking one. (Which is a little odd... normally I don't mind the food prep side.) So I just toasted two pieces of whole wheat bread, had one with cheese spread and the other with peanut butter and peach jam... which is a combination that it's very imprtant not to mix too closely, by the way, if you ask my opinion. Fine if you finish one slice, have a nice long swallow or two of orange juice to clean your palate, and then start on the other. I drank two glasses of orange juice too - well, maybe only one and three-quarters.

Sorry if I'm boring you with the trivia of Alex Charles Whitman's life by this point.

Breakfast was finished, the cheese spread back in the fridge, and the dishes cleaned up. I had picked a hardcover copy of 'The return of the king' off the living room bookshelves, decided that I didn't want to begin at the beginning, and was in the process of skimming back and forth when the phone rang. There was a cordless handset right there on the coffee table, within reach if I stretched over a little. "Y'ello?"

"Hey, Alex. It's Kyle. How're you?"

"Just a little surprised at the moment." Kyle and I have been hanging out a little more lately, but for him to call on a Sunday morning still falls under the 'unexpected' category. For one thing... well, I'm actually not sure what the one thing is, so I'll just get on with recounting the dialog. "What's up?"

"Umm... are you handy with engines at all? Like, cars?"

And the surprises kept coming. "Umm... not especially, I guess. Know how to change a spare tire, at least in theory because I'm not sure it's ever come up, and to, erm, check on various fluid levels." How come that had to sound so dirty? "Never really had much more experience than that. Tinkering with a computer motherboard is more my style. Why?"

"Oh... just, well, we need an extra pair of hands down at the garage, and I thought you could probably do with a quick spring break job. Earn some money for the junior prom, or... well, money for whatever."

The way he had retracted the mention of prom stung a little. Was it quite so obvious that I wouldn't be able to get a date for the big night, a month from now? "Well... the money wouldn't suck I admit. But if you need someone with a natural knack for the automobile, I might not qualify." A pause. "I think I'd characterize myself as bright, willing, and eager to learn." Now, just where had that come from? Hadn't I been looking forward to just goofing off and wasting my spring break, yesterday? And I didn't think boredom was setting in so soon...

"Okay, erm... I think I'll leave you as an alternate and not recommend you unless Tobey gets desperate, how about that?" Kyle said, sounding like he wasn't quite sure how else to deal with the situation I'd presented him.

"Sounds alright," I assured him. "Say, I've heard reports that sparks are flying between you and a certain short blonde houseguest."

"Why, Tess?"

"Um, yeah, there wouldn't be anyone else Chez Valenti who fits **that** description, would there?" I laughed softly.

"Yeah, I guess so. Um, well..." Kyle's voice dropped slightly, as if he was worried about someone overhearing on his end. "Not sure that I'd ever really want to, well... to get involved with a- you know." I mm-hmmed, just to signal that I knew what he meant. "But then again... she's really cute, isn't she?"

"Umm... well, yeah," I admitted after a second. "Not my type I think somehow, but definitely a very pretty girl."

"And... well, we have a lot of fun together." Kyle sighed. "Who did you hear this from, anyway? 'Cause I've kind of been making a show of hitting on her when she's around Evans... Max, I mean, just because it's funny to watch the look on his face."

"Hmmm..." Did Kyle understand the force of the interpersonal dynamics that he was playing with here? If Kyle flirted with Tess because it was his idea of fun to make Max jealous... it didn't necessarily stop there. If Max's green-eyed monster was so easy to bring to the surface, then maybe it was a sign of deeper feelings for Tess, which Kyle's meddling was just making more obvious - both to Max himself, and to Tess. If that effect became strong enough, and Kyle wasn't really interested in Tess himself, then it might indeed lead to the start of a Max/Tess relationship.

And that would leave Liz heartbroken, and more than a little vulnerable to being swept off her feet by a good friend who found that his feelings for her were growing stronger than just friendship. Of course, such a friend would find himself wedged into the role of being a rebound guy... but sometimes rebound guys _did_ manage to go the distance, right?

Was I really **wanting** this storyline to play out? It was hard to even admit that I had any kind of interest in Liz that way, though the evidence was starting to get hard to ignore. One thing I could tell, though... I wasn't going to tell Kyle what kind of fire he was playing with. If he figured it out for himself, or someone else clued into the game, then fine. But I wasn't going to spill. Somehow I could tell that Kyle wouldn't have been wild about the notion of his teasing actually helping to drive Max and Tess closer together.

"Well, anything else?"

"Not really. Have a nice day, or maybe a nice week if we don't talk later after all."

"Have a nice day yourself, Kyle." He hung up, and I put the phone down, wondering if I was going to be able to lose myself in Middle-earth for the morning after all.

#

Deep breath, and knock. I said knock! No, come on, you little wussie - you're gonna have to let her know you're here sooner or later, and just drumming silently on the door with your fingertips isn't going to do it. Knuckles tight, into a fist, and really let them rap against the wood!

Finally, I knocked. At first, there was no reply. And then, soft footfalls from inside the apartment beyond, and the faint 'clunk' of the doorknob turning from inside. Then it drew aside entirely, the door I mean, or inside I guess, because it was being pulled away from me. And there, of course, was Liz.

She was dressed very simply... a light, summery dress with a pattern of pink flowers on a white background, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and tiny gold hoops hanging from her ears. There was... well, it's cliche to say that my heart melted at the sight of her, but I could practically feel something go warm and squishy in that area, I kid you not. That was the point when I had to admit to myself that **something** was going on... I wasn't quite sure what to label it yet, but I knew I had feelings for Liz that definitely crossed the bounds of good friendship.

On the other hand... I really didn't have any basis to believe that she felt the same way, and she'd probably be a little shocked if I made a move too quickly or announced my change of heart too abruptly. Subtlety was called for.

I don't think I've ever been that good at subtlety.

Meanwhile, Liz was starting to get a slightly confused look on her face, probably because I was just standing at her door staring at her with an oddly intent look on my face. "Uhh, whoops," I mumbled. Great chatty opener. "Sorry, just got distracted for a moment there. Forgotten sonnets?"

"Yeah, that's the plan," she agreed with a little smile. "You got your gear there?"

"Um, where?" It was with some genuine surprise that I remembered slinging a book bag over my shoulder, and of course it was still there. Poetry textbook, handout binder from Mrs Batterson's class, and a spiral ring notebook for my own, nearly illegible scribblings. "Right. I may not have much, but what I have is... um, where did you want to get set up?" Would she say her bedroom? Did I really care _so_ much?

'No such luck' would seem to be the appropriate term. "Well, no-one else is using the dinner table, and we'd have plenty of space there. Better than crowding around my desk I guess." Myself, I'd have loved to have an excuse to crowd close next to Liz, but decided not to make an issue of it. We went into the kitchen and started to set up.

Once the books were out, it was actually pretty easy to get my mind on track for a while, and we shot back and forth various possiblities for the assignment in more or less the same way that we'd done for dozens of other school projects over the last four years or so. The lost shakespearean sonnets were actually pretty interesting, as far as English Lit assignment topics went, and we each had a few ideas, which seemed to feed off each other and multiply. (By the way, in case you didn't know this, the "lost" sonnets have actually been found now for longer than they were lost. Little point of trivia that I couldn't work into the assignment because Batterson would grade me down for telling her what she already knew, so I'm telling you. Even if you already know, you can't grade me down for it.)

"Okay, you can do a contrast versus Milton's Petrarchan work if you like," Liz said nearly an hour later. "She'll like that okay I think... it fits the assignment parameters well enough. I don't think I'll do the same, though... for one thing, she might pitch a bit of a hissy fit if we turn in similar theses like that."

"Alright, fair enough. Any idea what you want to do?"

"I might steal one of your ideas and talk about the theme of forbidden love in sonnets one fifty-eight through one-sixty-three. Maybe bring in a few references to 'the Winter's tale,' since they'll impress her, and wouldn't be completely inappropriate in the context."

I tried to cover my groan... 'forbidden love' had slipped out as a Freudian, even though it kind of did fit with some of the poems, and it was more than a little awkward for Liz to be actually picking that as her thesis. Then again... was it possible that she was doing it as a signal, conscious or unconscious? I suck with signals, too. "When, um, have you actually read 'The winter's tale?'"

"Yeah, most of it at least. I kinda skimmed through the first two acts, because I didn't like them so much."

"Just for the heck of it? I mean, not for a school assignment or anything?"

"I guess I always figured that it would come in handy at some point, maybe not until university." Liz laughed softly. "My dad's got this huge ten-volume set of Shakespeare's plays, annotated and everything. Well, footnoted I mean, I guess. Anyway, I... um, er..."

"It's okay," I quickly said. "You don't have to go into the whole story if you don't want to. I was just a little curious." Short silence. "Umm... can I get something to drink maybe?"

"Sure... how 'bout a royal crown?" She smiled, and I smiled back, as Liz went to the fridge and fetched two cans of the store-brand cola. "Yeah, I think this is enough english lit for now." As she settled down, she closed her books, and I did the same after finishing my first chug of the soda. "We haven't been at it for **that** long, but we've got a fair bit done, and it's spring break after all!"

"That it is," I admitted. "Umm... oh, Kyle asked me if I was any good at cars. They're short-handed down at the garage where he works. I had to admit that I wasn't anything worth writing home about... with an engine, I mean, internal combustion and all that." How had the phrasing come out like that? "He's keeping me in mind as an emergency trainee if they can't find anyone better, though."

"Um, when was all this?" Liz asked when I finally gave her a chance to reply by not speaking for four seconds.

"Oh, um, this morning, maybe ten-thirty. He called me up, which I found somehow unusual. Maybe it's just the first time it's happened."

"Oh, okay." Liz paused, then took a breath and held it for several seconds. "Did he, or... did the subject of Tess come up, by any chance?"

"Umm... yeah, actually, I asked him about her," I said. "He admitted hitting on her, but I pretty much get the impression that he wasn't very serious about it, just kind of playing around... trying to yank Max's chain." Liz considered that for a moment, and without knowing quite why, I blurted out a followup. "I don't think he realizes what he's doing, or where it could lead. With getting Max jealous, I mean. If it's so easy to get him to react, then maybe once Max and Tess see that, they'll... um, well. I wasn't sure how to tell Kyle about that part, or if I should."

"I... I don't know," Liz said with a weary sigh, and I realized that it was well time, or past time, to drop that particular subject of conversation. On the other hand, there didn't seem to be another convenient topic for me to pick up immediately.

Liz smiled slightly at me, acknowledging the awkward moment. "Umm, wanna go sit in front of the idiot box for a while, heheh?"

"Umm... sure!" We headed out into the living room, and I found a decent Star Trek rerun that had just started - it was the Deep space nine episode with the lady archaeoloist, the one who captain Picard had a crush on (on the other show, the one with Picard in it,) until Q whisked her off to unknown places. I'd seen it a few times before, and Liz didn't seem to be paying a huge amount of attention, but we both seemed pretty happy to leave it running for a while.

"Alex," Liz suddenly blurted out during a commercial about halfway through the show. "Do you ever wish that... that I hadn't sent Maria to get you that day, and bring you to the hospital? That none of us had ever... had ever told you about..."

I shut off the sound, partly because I just always find it a little hard to think when the video hucksters are yelling at me. "Um... no, I don't think that's ever occured to me, and now that you bring it up, I'm glad that I know." Big sigh. "Bottom line, no matter what a mess Isabel made of my heart, which wouldn't have happened if I didn't know about her secret I guess... I'm closer to you and Maria for sharing the secret, and that's worth it all just by itself. If you guys knew and I didn't... I think it would have inevitably driven us apart as friends by this point. Now, if the question was about _none_ of us knowing, that'd be tougher, actually." A pause. "Though Michael's cool, most of the time, and I wouldn't want to take him away from Maria without thinking hard about it first. Max, too, I suppose... I know that you have your baggage with him and Tess, but I'm still happy to call him a friend I think."

Liz nodded and considered that, as we watched Q and the ops crew argue silently onscreen. "I'm not sure what I'd say myself... if it were possible to stop that argument in the cafe, so Max would never have had to heal me. He would probably be safer now and happier... but something I can't quite pin down keeps me from saying that I'd rather it went that way." I considered that. "Why did all the lights on the station just go out except for the emergency boxes?"

"Well, that would pretty much be spoiling the ending," I teased her.

Liz turned to me, her eyes glinting with mischief. "I have ways of making you spill it, Whitman!"

I tried not to grin too widely. "Oh, yeah?"

She shuffled close and reached up to ruffle my hair, which I knew was only a preliminary tactic. I flinched away, not because I really minded, but because it would make her come after me.

Sure enough, she went for the bait... or maybe just went after me, though I'm not entirely sure I'm clear on the distinction. I have a very vivid memory of the way her slender figure looked, concealed under the modest dress but suggested by the way she was moving, as she stretched her arms out, trying to get a solid hold around my neck. I rolled away further, trying to keep her from getting a hold there quite yet... and it worked. One hand, the one that was attached to the nearer arm, was able to make contact around my neck, but the other fell short and landed on my upper chest, just beneath the collar of my shirt. I chuckled slightly at her failure.

"Oh, no you don't!" All concern for decorum or propriety had clearly been driven from Liz's mind by her determination, and I was taken by surprise with how quickly she scrambled up onto the couch so as to get better leverage from which to grapple with me. I made an attempt to roll out of the way again, and not a token effort this time either, but it was too little and too late anyway - she had her knees digging into my waist from each side, squeezing, as her arms locked solidly around my throat in a kind of playful piggyback hold. I was able to stagger carefully off the couch, lifting her up with me, but I didn't have my balance and knew, above anything, that I didn't want to risk hurting her. So I managed to drop down onto my knees without hurting them, (going one at a time, on the Parker's thick living room carpet, helped,) and then sagged down to one side.

"Not so tough now, are you?" Liz gasped out. I didn't feel particularly tough right now, sure enough... in fact, what I mostly felt was Liz. Her thighs were still pressing against my sides, and with her arms stretching around my neck, that left her breasts making pretty firm contact against my upper back, through our clothes, something that I was becoming more and more aware of with each passing second. I realized that the rassling was having a physical effect on my that might be very embarassingly evident, if Liz happened to change which aspect of my body she was focusing on and aware of.

"Alex Charles Whitman, lieutenant junior grade," I gasped out. Not quite sure why I went with this tack... the fact that the oxygen supply to my brain was being threatened probably had something to do with it. "Serial number three eight oh seven four five nine, currently assigned to planet Bajor."

"Okay... what the heck?" Liz relaxed her grip, but only slightly.

"Name, rank, serial number... that's all you're getting out of me." I laughed hollowly.

Liz groaned and moved one hand over to pinch hard at the tender skin of my neck. "Really?"

"Okay, okay, I give," I whined, with as much dignity as I could clutch to myself. "It's the big fancy multicolored crystal thing that whatsername brought with her. Really it's a baby alien embryo or something like that, sucking energy out of the station to try to break free."

Liz shook herself slightly... I couldn't really see the motion, but I could certainly feel it. "Okay... that wasn't so hard, was it?" And she let me go - quickly I turned around to get a look. She was... delightfully disarrayed, if that's anything like the right term - her ponytail twisted around so that the tip of it had actually gone down the front of her dress, and several locks of hair had escaped from the tie and were falling as they pleased. The hem of the dress had ridden up almost to the danger zone, though I only got a glimpse of **that** for maybe a second and a half before she was smoothing the fabric back down to where it belonged, and one of her sneakers was still next to the couch. Her cheeks were flushed, her breath still rapid, and...

And Liz was falling - literally. I'm not quite sure how it happened... I think that maybe she was trying to walk past me, or over me, to get a chance to sort herself out, and the way I had rolled around meant that I wasn't where she'd expected me to stay, and she tripped or something. What I remember, is seeing her stumble and completely lose her balance... and then she had landed.

Landed in my arms.

"How... how did you do that," she breathed, and for a second, I couldn't understand what she meant.

"Do... do what? I didn't have to do anything... even spread my arms. They were open already, and you just... landed right."

"No - trust me," she breathed, and I shook my head in confusion. "When I was starting to fall, you were nowhere near in the right position to catch me." Dimly, I realized that she was right. "You just kind of... you shinnied around on the floor like... I guess I should just be glad that you were able to keep me from hurting myself or anything."

"It'd be appreciated." Suddenly I relialized that I was still holding Liz tightly... much too tightly considering that whatever danger there was had passed. I also realized that I was still kind of excited from the contact earlier, and that Liz was now in a position where she could possibly feel the excitement from contact with me. Specifically, her leg was pretty much touching my... okay, maybe I shouldn't have got that specific. Anyway, I kind of jerked away from her as soon as I realized that part, and Liz gave me a 'that was weird' look and got herself stood up.

"Okay, umm..." Liz sighed. "I guess we'd probably better turn the television off at this point." And she reached out and pressed the button, and the promenade of the space station disappeared in a flicker of colors.

"Yeah, alright." I stood up myself and scrambled back to the far end of the couch as casually as I could. Liz sat down too. "Well, I have a question," I blurted out.

Liz raised an eyebrow at me. "Really... and what would that be?"

"Are... no. Have - have you thought about dating someone else/ Just as a general possibility? I mean... well, I'm not quite sure what you feel for Max at this point, but... well, it doesn't really look like you've made a move to be with **him** lately. And... well, not meaning to be excessively blunt or anything, but it's possible that if you change your mind and _do_ want to go out with Max, he wouldn't be interested anymore."

Liz made a sad face, but she nodded. "Yeah, I guess you're right about that."

"And... well, you've been wrapped up in the Max thing for nearly a year and a half now, to the extent that there hasn't been anyone else in your romantic life... since you broke up with Kyle, and except for that one Valentine's day blind date, which didn't exactly work out well as planned. Maybe it would do you good to try having a night out with someone else... someone, dare I say it, more normal?"

Liz thought about that for a second. "Was that why you started something with Leanna?"

"Umm... maybe. I hadn't really thought about it that way. But... well, things with Isabel weren't really going anywhere, and so when I met someone who was nice and who seemed to like me a little, I took a chance. Even if it didn't last long, I'm not sorry that I did."

"Yeah, that's a good way to look at it I guess," Liz agreed, nodding. "Got anybody in mind for me, or do I have to keep my own eyes open?"

For a second, I was tempted to blurt out something about wanting Liz to date me, or wating to date her... but something still didn't feel right. It was too soon, and this wasn't quite the right moment. On the other hand, I didn't want to say no straight out, just in case. So... "Umm... get back to me on that a bit later, okay?"

"Umm... I guess, sure."

I sighed. "Wanna head over to my place? I downloaded a few cool freeware computer games off the net."

"Ehh... not really." Liz sighed. "We could go back to Frazier woods I guess. Bring out notebooks in case inspiration strikes..."

"Yeah right," I mumbled under my breath.

"And just enjoy the beautiful weather," she finished. "Maybe even bring some food for dinner."

I laughed. "Do you guys still have that picnic basket that your mom used to pack?"

"Umm... I think so, maybe. Wanna take a look around the kitchen to see what'd be good to pack, and I'll see if I can find it."

"Gotit." I smiled - all of the awkwardness had gone away, at least for the moment, and we were just the same best of friends we'd always been. I was still crushing on Liz, but that didn't have to make things weird between us... or at least, I hoped not.

#

Liz found the picnic basket, and we packed about half a dozen sandwhiches, of several different kind, and some potato salad that Liz's mom had made for lunch that day, and freezer-chilled cans of pop and a few other little treats. It was maybe four thirty by the time I parked the thirdhand GM sedan that I'd only got about a month ago in a small nook of the forest roads, which looked like it had been specifically cleared of underbrush so that somebody could park a car there.

"Back to waterfall clearing?" I asked Liz.

She considered, taking the picnic basket out of the back seat. "Nah, actually, I want to see if the campsite past the river junction is free. It isn't far." And she started walking down the path the other way.

I wasn't sure which campsite she was talking about... it wouldn't have been the place that the father/child campout had been based, so maybe there was someplace that she'd been just with Maria, or... well, I didn't know. But I didn't really mind, and hurried to catch up with her.

"So," Liz muttered as we walked. "How's the computer stuff coming? Gonna be the next internet multimillionnaire before senior year starts?"

I laughed slightly. "Gonna take a bit longer than that, if ever, I'm afraid. But I'm having fun and learning a lot. Part of the problem is that most people are saying that the dot com boom has definitively busted... the bubble is popped. Most of the people who got rich did it by selling other people on something that was, essentially, a pipe dream, and then cashing out early. I... I'm not sure if I'll ever have a chance to get rich, but I wouldn't want to do it like that... well, erm." Thought about it a little, and decided to come clean. "If it was really a _lot_ of money, and I needed some, then maybe I'd give in to temptation. But I wouldn't feel good about it."

Liz snickered a little. "Yeah, I'm not sure how many zeroes could go onto the paycheck before I threw out my principles, either. If it ever comes up, feel free to nag me and remind me about my scruples."

"Okay, I'll try," I replied, giggling. "But you'd probably just offer me a cut to stop me from bugging you about it."

Liz sighed slightly. "What about Brody's money? Did it come from one of those snake oil deals?"

"Umm... not as far as I can tell," I said. "The company that he helped found is still going strong and starting to turn a profit, though whether it'll make back what they paid him off is still a little hard to say. Online gaming stuff, some pretty cool cyberspace stuff. The programming part is still way out of my depth, to even guess how they were able to create unreal worlds so... so convincingly."

Liz smiled. "Have you actually played one?"

"Yeah, there was a layover in London on the way to Sweden, and I was able to spend about three-quarters of an hour at a British technology expo. It was amazing."

"Well, you may not know everything there is to know about computers and programming yet," Liz sighed as we passed a bend in the road, "but if you keep at it, I don't think there isn't anything you won't be able to accomplish." And she smiled serenely.

"Well, thanks I guess."

"So you'll probably get a chance at that multi-million dollar payoff without it being crooked." She sighed. "But just in case it **is**... what do you want me to do?"

I laughed. "That's kind of up to you. You can argue the high road... but if I've given in to temptation, I might not take it too well, I warn you."

Liz giggled.

Wasn't long after that point we arrived at the campsite Liz had been heading for. I took the picnic basket from her at some point, can't really remember when - might have been while we were talking about dot-com sellouts. And just as we were getting there, I passed another empty parking spot on the road and pointed it out to Liz. "Guess we could have just driven up here instead of walking the whole way."

"Yeah, I suppose so. But why not walk?" And I guess I didn't have an answer to that one.

The campsite was a great place to spend a little time in the woods, though it could have done just as well or better for a larger group... maybe for the eight of us kids in the gang, if we could gather together without any fights breaking out. (I suppose that there'd even be room for a ninth, so Isabel could bring Grant along if she insisted on it... rumble grumble.)

And, as an aside... just in case anyone thinks that it's inconsistent to be jealous of Grant now that I was setting my sights, so to speak, on the lovely and splendid Liz Parker... well, I never claimed to be consistent. (Did you know that it's logically impossible to be consistent and modest at the same time? It's a fun little proof, remind me to tell it to you sometime. I'm not sure that I'm either.) Also, I'm not at all sure that jealousy is the only reason I dislike Grant Sorenson.

There was a picnic table, and a firepit and a barbecue, (too bad we hadn't brought anything that really wanted cookin or open fire,) and, connected with the rest of the campsite by a narrow path through some trees, where was a small strip of sandy beach that faced one side of the river. There was a family with little kids down on the beach though... I think they had set up tents in a second campsite that connected to the beach as well.

But I didn't mind that so much. Liz and I set up on the picnic table, unpacking the basket, and chatting about old times and books that we'd been reading recently. Liz went on in considerable detail on this series of historical melodramas set in the late 1600s spain, that Maria had started her on. I mostly just listened, entranced by the sound of Liz's voice more than by what she was saying specifically. That was kind of when I knew that I really had it bad for her.

We chatted a bit more, and I noticed that Liz was starting to grow quiet and thoughtful. "Hey, what's so interesting, going on inside that brain of yours," I said jokingly.

"Oh, just got myself worrying about... did I ever tell you much about Ava, and all of that stuff to do with, well, with the summit meeting that Max went to in New York?"

Uh-oh. Angst warning, proceed with caution. "Um, not specifically. I kind of got some of the details thirdhand through Maria - you thought that Lonnie and Rath might kill Max if things went wrong, or even if they just didn't need him anymore, because Ava saw them kill Zan, to get him out of the way because they thought they could get Max to go to the Summit, since Zan didn't want any of them to go." I paused. "So... somehow Isabel managed to use her dreamwalking power to warn Max... and Maria said that Michael said you were important there, though she couldn't really explain to me what you'd done to help."

"I... I'm not sure I can explain it myself," Liz complained.

"I'd be interested in hearing you try to summarize your part in it," I said as encouragingly as I could. "Might help you figure it out for yourself."

"You're right," she agreed. "Okay, well... Isabel had been able to get into Max's brain, she thought, but not to make him notice her. Between the distance from Roswell to New York, which was longer than she'd ever dreamwalked before, and the fact that Max was completely awake and coherent at the time... well, the best way I could figure it is, she can connect to someone's subconscious." I nodded in agreement. "That's how she can walk into someone's dreams. But when Max was awake, he wasn't paying any attention to his subconscious, any more than the rest of us do. That's pretty much what makes it a subconscious, that it's beneath our awareness most of the time. So she couldn't use that to warn Max."

"Makes sense so far," I agreed. "Would have been interesting to see if she could plant a subliminal message that way or something, but it was probably too risky under the circumstances. Where did you come in?"

Liz sighed, looking past me at the woods around us for a while. The light of day was beginning to get less bright, though the sun probably wouldn't set for an hour or more yet. "Ava said a bunch of stuff that I'm still not sure what to make of... about how Max brought me back from the dead, and so I was changed. She said that I'd be able to help Isabel get through to Max... though she didn't explain how she knew any of this."

"Ohh... so that's how Kyle got onto the teenage alien kick?" I asked. Liz shot me a look. "He said something about that when we were trapped in the Gandarium cave - that he was part alien now, because Max had saved his life. I didn't really know what he meant by it at the time."

Liz smiled. "I'm still not sure what Ava 'meant by it'. But the upshot is... well, Isabel looked into my eyes, and did that weird 'making a connection' alien pocus - and... I'm not sure how to describe it, but for a moment I was standing on a Manhattan street. Parts of it were fuzzy, like not quite in focus, and I wasn't getting much in the way of sounds or smells. But Max and the others were perfectly clear. Tess, Rath, and Lonnie. I screamed at him, tried to warn him, but he couldn't seem to hear what I was saying. He tried to reply, and it was like he was a tv picture set with the volume... um, not quite mute but so low you really can't make anything out. And..." She sighed and broke off, shaking her head slightly.

"Go on," I muttered. It was weird hearing her talk about Max like this, but I knew that this was something Liz had to get off her chest, as it were.

"Rath grabbed Tess from behind... pinned both of her arms with one of his own, slammed a hand down over her mouth and face to keep her quiet. Lonnie... she used her powers to get something heavy, high up above Max, to fall down. I was trying to tell him, and then I realized that it was no good and I was about to point, but I got a little dizzy and had a hard time raising my arm.

"But... but he stepped closer to me, trying to figure out what was going on, and that was enough to get him out of the path of danger. I blipped back to the cafe dining room pretty much at that point - my body had been there all along, with just my mental energy making contact with Max, somewhere halfway between his subconscious and conscious mind I guess. And, well... there was more to his story in New York of course, but that's all I was really getting hung up on. The part about me being changed."

I just sat there, and reached out to touch her hand with my own, not being sure what to say. Liz looked around the clearing, and smiled at me. "I don't hear it anymore."

"Huh?" I looked around, trying to hear... there were a few noticeable sounds that I could still hear, but I wasn't particularly aware of _not_ hearing something. "Not hear what?"

"The kids playing at the beach." She led the way back down, and sure enough, the family had gone. There wasn't even a sound from their campsite... maybe they'd gone for a drive, or a hike through the woods. Liz turned back to me. "Wanna go... well, not skinny dipping I guess. Underwear swimming, like you did yesterday?"

I was so stunned I felt like I might fall over. "You... are you serious?" Of course, I wanted to, but... "Neither of us has a towel this time... well, not any closer than the car I guess." Some odd impulse had pushed me into putting two big beach towels that had seen better days in the trunk last night, just because of being caught without one at the waterfall with Liz. "If you want to go for a swim, maybe we should run back and get them first."

"Nah, that's too sensible." And right then, Liz started to shrug the dress she was wearing over her head... which took a little while, but I just stood there and frankly stared. Soon her trim figure was covered only with a white bra, and a pair of panties. She folded the material of the dress twice over her arm, pulled the ponytail tie away from her hair in one motion, and kicked off her shoes. "In case you couldn't tell, I'm being impulsive."

"Um, uh, yeah, I **got** that much," I mumbled. Liz went over and put her dress down on a rock, and I felt like my eyes were possibly shooting a laser beam hot enough to singe the fabric stretched over her pert rear end. But she didn't yelp in astonishment, so of course I guess she couldn't feel the intensity of my passionate eyes.

I tried not to make it completely obvious that I was gawking when she turned around, but Liz still giggled... for exactly what reasons I couldn't be particularly sure. "Are you gonna take off your clothes and come with me?"

Gee... was I? Stupid question - though of course, she didn't realize quite how stupid... I hoped. "Yeah. But you go in first," I managed to choke out. "So if the water's cold enough that you can't even stay in for a moment, I don't have to bother." Hiding the fact that I was painfully stiff and didn't really want to make it embarassingly obvious to her... though since her little routine had bordered on the exhibitionistic then maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't be surprised - or upset about my reaction.

Liz shot a 10-kiloton pout at me, (nuclear and explosive,) and strode into the river. She shivered very vehemently when it got up to her knees, which made her body shift and sway in even more enticing ways, but didn't stop or turn back. As she went in, I slipped out of my t-shirt and my dockers. As it happened, I was wearing cotton briefs today... less loose and comfy than the boxers of yester, but that was the way fate turned sometimes.

As it happened, Liz didn't turn back until I was already waist deep in the water, and the same coldness had a calming effect on my little crotch problem, as cool water often tends to. She probably couldn't have seen anything through the water even if she'd been trying. I swam out to meet her, and Liz smiled, waiting, and dunked her head beneath the surface. When I got close to her, her hair was falling down all around her head in soggy locks of deep darkness, and water was still dripping from her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, and her chin. Somehow, she'd never ever looked prettier.

"Alex?" She cocked her head slightly. "You've got an odd expression on your face. What's wrong?"

I breathed in, sharply. So suddenly, the moment of truth had come, it seemed. What did I say to her?


	3. Chapter 3

"Umm, uhh... I'm not quite sure how to say this," I mumbled to Liz, my hands running softly back and forth through the water around us, which was up to my upper chest. Liz was up to her neck, and I realized that she was alternately standing on her tiptoes and treading water. My bare feet seemed to be pretty firmly planted in the sandy river bottom - like I couldn't have moved them if I tried.

"Alex?" Liz seemed very confused by my reaction, and I couldn't blame her. There was no way... well, at the most one chance in a thousand, that she knew what I was thinking of. "No matter what it is, things'll be okay. You can tell me."

I smiled, appreciating the sentiment, and opened my mouth. "Liz... ever since yesterday - I know this is weird timing, but I think I'm falling for you. Err... as in 'falling in love.'"

Liz must have been so surprised that she forgot to tread water for a second. I saw the bottom half of her face slip below the gente currents, her mouth open in shock, filling with water. Terrified that she might actually start to drown, I rushed forward, cradling her shoulders with one arm and grabbing her right forearm with my right hand, lifting her up so that her mouth would rise out of the water as best I could. She shook herself slightly when she realized what I was doing and sprayed an impressive spout of water out of her mouth into the air.

"Umm... sorry," we both managed to mumble at the same time, and then the nervous laughter started. "Well... I get that you're surprised," I mumbled, feeling incredibly embarassed, "but I think I'd appreciate it if you could actually muster up a reaction of some sort."

"I... I'm not sure what to say," Liz admitted. "I'm sorry, but that's just kind of the way things are. I... I know this is cliche, but I never really thought of you as anything other than a friend."

"I have," I admitted. Liz looked even more surprised at that revelation.

"Umm, when?"

"For a lot of last year. When you were first getting to know Max, for instance... I was **incredibly** jealous, because it was clear that you were crazy about him. That was kinduv the unspoken element that made the whole blood swap thing so angsty and psychologically complicated. That you'd asked for something so incredibly vital from me, to help him, and you wouldn't even tell me why. Kind of made me feel as if you'd made your priorities, your choice, incredibly clear, and what I wanted didn't count for anything once Max was in the picture."

"Oh..." Liz's face fell. "I never... never meant to make you feel like th..."

"I understand, now..." I assured her. "It wasn't that you were specifically doing any of that stuff." I thought about it a moment. "Maybe was a little like you had blinders on... all you could think about was what Max needed, because he really **was** in a jam, more than I could possibly have realized at the time. And you did care about him an awful lot. Between worrying about all of that, you didn't exactly have time to see things from my point of view. _and_, well... both of us were keeping things from each other. You couldn't tell me about Max's secret... not until all the chips were down and you had no other choice. And I hadn't been able to tell you how I really felt, back then. So neither of us could really understand what the other person felt."

Liz smiled slightly, and nodded. "But wait a second... what about Isabel, weren't you..."

"I... I had fantasies about Isabel," I admitted. "The mysterious sophomore class ice princess: beautiful, standoffish, but she got a faraway melancholy look in her eyes when she didn't think anyone could see her. I daydreamed about being the one to take down the wall she'd built around her heart, yeah... in about the same way I had fantasies about Natallie Roberts, who was on the senior varsity basketball team that year." I chuckled softly. "Or Willow Rosenberg, for that matter." Liz smiled. "In my mind, I thought they were all equally impossible dreams. Even though I could tell you didn't really like me back, you were different. You were part of my world, completely aware of mu existence at least."

"Hmm." Liz thought about that. "How did things change once you, umm, once you started getting to know Isabel better?"

"I... I'm not quite sure," I admitted. "I still held on to that torch for you a while... I think I'd let go already, before the morning that Isabel showed up at my front door and kissed me." Liz giggled. "So I'm not sure when it was... sometime around the UFO convention maybe. Guess there wasn't a particular moment when I said to myself, 'everything's changed.'"

"Okay, I understand," Liz replied, stroking sideways in the gentle flow. "Sometimes life goes like that. But... well, it nearly goes without saying that a lot of things have changed since last year. And as far as you and me goes..."

She trailed off, and I held my breath for a long moment. "Come on, you're killin' me here!" I finally told her.

Liz laughed. "I... I don't think I'm falling in love with you. I've hardly had time. But I want to, um, to try, if that makes any sense."

"You... you do?" I could hardly bring myself to believe what I was hearing.

"Yeah. I think the two of us could be something amazing, breathtaking together." Liz smiled that special smile that made her whole face seem to shine. "You're really cute, and smart and funny and incredibly sweet, and I know that you'd never do anything to hurt me, or let anything in this whole world harm me if there was something that you could do to help it. What more could I ever need, want, or ask for?"

"I can think of a few things," I joked, "but I'm not saying anything about them."

Liz shook her head. "So... um, what do we do about it now, then? I mean, well, do you want to..."

"I want to seal it with a kiss," I said, hoping that fortune really did favor the bold.

She laughed, and it sounded like the ringing of a distant... well, some kind of lovely music. "Works for me!"

And with that, all the choking nervousness struck again, of course. Was that because I thought the kiss wouldn't go well, and things would fall apart? Or because some part of me felt the kiss **would** go well, and then there would be less to be nervous about, thus as much of it as possible was manifesting right now?

I stepped forward in the water, and put my arms around Liz, bringing my hands to the small of her back, bent my head and leaned in, and our lips met. One lock of her wet hair kind of got caught in between my cheek and hers, because I'd been too pre-occupied to brush it out of the way first, but I certainly didn't seem to mind it being there, and neither did Liz.

The kiss was sweet and exquisitely heartfelt... I could feel Liz's lips, as soft and supple as I'd ever dreamed, pressing lightly against mine, and our upper bodies just barely, thrillingly touching. Little sparks of electric energy, heat, fire, even possibly some sort of high-density plasma were running all through my blood, my whole system. Liz sighed very softly, a noise that was mostly confined to her throat, because it couldn't exactly get out the usual way, but I was so close to her that there was no way I could possibly miss the sound.

Liz's lips parted ever so slightly and the tip of her tongue emerged, to stroke the top of my mouth. And then, before I could think of a response, it vanished again, which I didn't think was an intentional tease. More likely, she'd suddenly reconsidered and decided that this wasn't the appropriate venue for french macking... which I could understand and accept, though I was more than a bit disappointed.

After maybe a minute I pulled back, looking into those incredible brown eyes. For some reason I stayed quiet and tried to convey a wordless question to her with a single look. She smiled slightly.

"Still not sure it's love yet," Liz breathed, "but I'm falling into something, Alex." And she errupted into a fit of giggles that sounded unberably sexy, and splashed idly in the water with one hand. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around me.

#

"Ohmigawd," Liz breathed as the two of us hurried back up the road. "I can't quite believe that I did that."

"Did what?" I teased, brushing a bit of hair away from her shoulder. We had both put on our shoes and I was wearing my t-shirt but not my pants. Liz had decided, somewhat reluctantly, not to don her dress again until she could towel herself off... 'because I'd probably just soak the thin fabric through,' she had said.

"_You_ know," Liz insisted, nudging me with a more-than-damp elbow. "Stripped right down to my underthings and teased you about going into the water like that." She sighed. "I wouldn't have had the nerve to go through with it, if I'd known you were falling."

"Well... I'm glad you did," I told her honestly. "Otherwise, I might not have had the nerve to tell you how I felt for days or weeks, if ever. Putting on a show like that was definitely... an inducement." Liz shook her head at me and tried to poke me again, but I just managed to dodge away.

"Oh, no, somebody's coming!" she said about twenty seconds later... sure enough, there was a motor sound coming up the road... from behind is, moving in the same direction that we were. Well... this might be a little embarassing, but since there didn't seem to be any tracks we could take to safely dodge in among the trees, what was there for it? I moved to the very left side of the path to let the vehicle, whatever it was, go by, and carried my pants in such a position that they might provide a little bit of extra protection.

Liz squealed in panic and looked for a second as if she might leave the road anyway, no matter if there wasn't a decent trail. But she seemed to decide against that in the end, and waited next to me, as a pickup truck appeared, the lights seeming bright against the woodsy dusk all around us. As the truck passed, there was some whooping in both male and female voices. Young people, older than us but not by much - high school seniors probably, maybe college freshmen, except that... well, their spring break wasn't this week, but it was only Sunday evening so maybe. Nobody that I recognized.

But soon enough the slight embarassment was over, and it was just the two of us again, and the pickup headlights reflected off a glint of metal ahead that had to be my car. "So, umm... what do you want to do when we're dried and dressed?" I asked. It was, suddenly, a very strange sensation to refer to Liz and myself as 'we'. Before this evening, it would just mean 'the two of us as friends,' but now... what were we?

Boyfriend and girlfriend sounded like jumping the gun by a considerable margin, as did the words 'a couple' in the traditional sense. But even though the words that had bound us together were vague and ill-defined, the sense of connection they hinted at was something that sent ripples up and down my back. I'd told Liz that I was falling in love with her, and she'd said she wanted to give... well, give something a try with me. Presumably some variety or species of dating... that sounds funny, even in my head. 'A species of dating.' Hmmm...

"Um, I'm really not sure," Liz admitted, startling me out of my own thoughts one more time. "Probably nothing more here in the woods... we can head back into town. And nothing particularly involving food, since we've already eaten... and we just went to a movie yesterday." She laughed. "You know, we'd be further along with this dating thing if we could make it retroactive."

I laughed along with the notion... up to a point. "Yeah, but that kind of defeats the point." I didn't say what the point really was out loud, but Liz nodded as if she knew. No matter how much we'd been doing date-like activities over the past two days, the fact that Liz didn't think of them as dates at the time... and neither did I really, no matter how much I wished they were... it kept most of the interpersonal dynamics thoroughly platonic. Was that the point of a date, then? To have a trial run at relating to someone else with a romantic overtone to whatever happened, and see how well that worked? It kinduv fit.

"Well, do you _want_ to do something datelike tonight?" I asked her. "We don't really have to... we've already spent a lot of time together today, and we've got all week at least."

Liz thought about that. We arrived at the car, and I got the towels out. "Umm... not something big, if that's alright," Liz said. "But... maybe just a little something?"

I smiled at her... and not just because she was trying, at this point, to rub dry her scantily clad figure as thoroughly as possible. "Sure, something small sounds alright to me. Like... going out for drinks, er, as in sodas somewhere?"

"Perfect!" Liz's face changed from delight to pensiveness. "But where? Umm... I'd really rather not go back to the Crash, just because..."

"Yeah, I understand," I told her. "Well, how about Fred's? I don't suspect that anyone who's likely to care about us will be there."

Liz slipped her dress on. "Cool."

Fred's diner is a little place in the south side of town... not too popular with kids our age at all actually. Mostly gets by as a seventies nostalgia diner for fortyish parents, since they were teenagers in the mid-seventies. But something about tonight made me feel as if a walk down memory lane to the sort of soda shop date that hadn't really existed outside of movies since before Liz and I were born might be just the ticket.

There weren't even many parents at Fred's once we got there, and Liz led the way to a cozy corner booth. I sat beside her instead of across the table, looking forward to a chance to be close to her. "Any idea what you want to order?" I asked her, and then daringly added, "sweetie?"

Liz grinned when she realized I was using an endearment on her. "Umm... not sure really. What about you?"

"Umm... I don't really need anything fancy. Maybe a cream soda or a good root beer if they have any."

"Somehow, I think Fred'll have something good in stock. Oh, hi?" Liz smiled at the waiter, a smooth and somehow... okay, well, he was in his late twenties, and there was something about the impression I got from my first look at the guy that I can't quite put into words, but that fit **very** well for a waiter somehow. "We're just in here for drinks, if that's okay."

"Sure. The beverages and desserts menu is right there behind the sugar shaker, miss." Waiter-guy nodded and left, presumably to give us a little time to settle on drinks. Urbane - that's it, that's what struck me about this guy. Excessively polite, but in a way that it would be hard to get upset about.

Liz reached out to pick up the little, but surprisingly thick, menu: she was closer to the front wall of the diner, which was where the suger shaker had been placed, so it would have been well out of my reach even if I'd tried to stretch past her. "Ooohh..." she exlaimed after examining it for a moment. "They have Boylan works creme soda... and Fitz's root beer. That's a good one, isn't it?"

"Umm... yeah, really good," I agreed, taken by surprise. I'm not sure why I hadn't expected that Liz would look through the menu first for something for me, instead of trying to decide for herself. In retrospect, that's completely in character for her, but I had absolutely not been expecting it. Was that because it didn't strike me as something that Isabel would be likely to do, if I'd been out with her? Or would Liz have done it if we'd just come as friends? Maybe she would have... if I'd mentioned what I was interested in beforehand.

"Yeah, the Fitz's sounds great," I said in a low voice several seconds later. "What about you, then? See anything that strikes your fancy?"

"Um, yeah, actually..." she was tracing her finger over the page still, evaluating several options before making her final decision. "Little odd sounding I know, but I've got an itch to try a seven-up ice cream float... with, yeah, with raspberry ripple ice cream!"

I laughed softly... it did sound kinda weird, but also delicious. I toyed with the notion of going for a fancy ice cream float myself... and then decided not to this time... though I might well see if I could get a raspberry spoonful's worth of hers.

Well, I'm not going to narrate in great and gory detail how we ordered our drinks, and what we talked about before they arrived... partly because I don't remember that well myself. I'm pretty sure that Liz brought up the only girlfriend I'd ever had before sophomore year started and I met Isabel... her name was Jessica Rooke, and she... well, actually, I kind of found her really annoying, which was immediately obvious to both Liz and Maria the first time they saw us together, but I was just kind of surprised by the notion of a girl actually liking me and went along with the deal for about three and a half weeks. Ever since, they've seen fit to tease me about her.

"Mmmm," I said after our mugs had been brought to the table. That was some really good root beer, by the way. "So, umm... would it be pushing things to ask if you're free for tomorrow evening?"

Liz giggled. "No, I think that'd be alright... or I'll save you the trouble. Got nothing in particular on my schedule, pretty sure about that. What didja have in mind?"

"Umm... I'm not sure yet." Somehow, this situation seemed to call for an _amazing_ first date, and I wasn't sure exactly what would be ideas for a great first date with Liz. Well, hopefully I'd think of something in the morning. "But let's say tentatively that I'll pick you up at five thirty?"

"Umm... sounds great, yeah," Liz agreed. "Boy... really didn't think when I woke up this morning that I'd be making a date before the day was out... never mind that I'd be making one with _you_, of... well, of all guys." She paused, and then looked up at me. "Didn't mean to imply anything with that last bit, except that... it was unexpected - ya know?"

"Yeah, I think I know what you mean," I admitted, and then took another mouthful of my drink. "So, what happens when we finish our drinks and go?"

"You're asking me?" Liz asked in a slightly incredulous voice, and I laughed. "Well, if I had to... to say one way or another - or maybe a bit of both, one way being guessing, and the other being saying what I'd like..."

She trailed off around there, and I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her a little. "Yeah?"

"We'd get back into your car, talk about something unexpected on the ride home, like, erm... like the similarity between bats, bears, and donkeys..." she giggled. "You park in the Crashdown lot, and we go in through the side door into the back, and I sneak upstairs first to see if my parents are around and where we can have our kiss goodnight without anyone bothering or spotting us." She caught sight of the clock on the wall and jumped slightly. "Then you drive home, and Maria calls me at ten thirty to see if there's anything new going on with me - and I try to figure out on the spot what to tell her!"

"Oh," I said. "Right. Well... do you want to tell her about... about us?"

"I... I'd rather she didn't ask, but I don't want to deliberately hide it from her if she asks, and I don't want to avoid her so she can't ask," Liz mumbled, blushing a little. "Just not quite sure how I'll explain it."

"And once she knows, the cat kinda gets out of the bag," I said... not too regretfully I think, just facing the facts. "Once you tell Maria, she's probably going to want to tell Michael. When **he** knows... I'd be surprised if he weren't off to the Evans homestead pretty quickly."

"Yeah. It's gonna be interesting," Liz said with a teasing smile.

I nodded... and then realized that she was already pretty much down to the ice creamy mush, having drunk all the rest of her seven up float. "By the way, can I have a raspberry spoonful?"

"Hey, why didn't you order your own?"

"Because it's more fun to get a little share of yours!"

Liz thought about that a moment, and... I would think it would be hard for her smile to get any wider or brighter, but somehow she managed it. "Okay, but then I get some of the rest of your drink. Fair sharing is only fair, right?"

"Oh, certainly." She offered her mug towards me, and I took the little tea spoon that had been sitting on my paper napkin and got a blob of pinkish ice cream mush. (You know, the stuff that you get when the ice cream in a float has got just a little soda mixed in with it.) "Mmmm... that's delicious, really!"

"Glad you liked it," Liz said, and took my mug of root beer and tipped it so that about half of what I'd left in it - I'd already drunk more than half of it, so she got maybe a fifth of a mugful... and she poured it into her own mug, mixing it with what was left of her ice cream float, generating a surprising about of new brownish-pink foam. I burst out laughing, just because I hadn't been expecting that... I thought that Liz would drink the root beer straight, as I had, but mixing it in with hers made a bit more sense really.

Things after that happened pretty much as Liz had described... well, first off, there was the question of paying the bill. Liz said that she wanted to go dutch, but I made a big show of insisting on paying the whole thing. I generally don't make so big a point out of the traditional dating roles like that, but what I was really thinking of was that Liz and I have been hanging out together for a while, and going dutch was the norm while we were friends, more or less. Me paying... or if Liz really feels like taking me out, her paying, seemed like a good way to keep the transition from friends to dating slightly more straight. A nice root beer and an ice cream float wasn't too pricey, of course. The real date, tomorrow, might be enough that I had to dip into savings.

Hmm... maybe I'd need to take a job just to keep up with the expenses of having, (or trying to get,) a girlfriend. Wonder how the garage mechanic search was coming?

"Bats, bears, and donkeys?" I repeated as Liz buckled herself in, and I turned the ignition key. Once again, she giggled, which was a sound I was liking to hear more and more.

"Well, that was just a guess," she said. "We're free to throw in elephants too, if either of us feels like it."

#

"Okay, I guess this is it," Liz said, coming down the stairs. "My parents are watching TV in the living room. Ummm..."

I looked around the back room of the diner myself. No-one was around... well, Jose the chef was close enough that we could hear him, but not see him, and presumably he couldn't see us. However, a waitress might come back through the door from the dining room at any moment, or even a customer, since there were a number of usual suspects who didn't seem to think of this back room as 'out of bounds' for them.

"How about we go back out into the parking lot?" I asked. Obviously Liz didn't want to let me into her bedroom tonight, and the most appropriate spot otherwise, the balcony outside her room, was certainly a bad idea, because she had too many Max-based memories rooted there.

"Umm... alright!" Liz followed me back out the door, considered a few possibilities, and leaned against the wall of the building. I grinned and leaned in close, one hand up in her hair... (It was dry now, probably the first time it had really been dry since our swim, and she had never put it back into that ponytail,) and the other leaning ever so lightly on her hip. Our lips met eagerly, sweet and playful, and I pressed my tongue gently against the opening to her mouth. She opened up to let it in, but I didn't go open mouth for long. Somehow it still didn't seem right yet.

"I... I can't wait until tomorrow," Liz breathed in wonder, looking up at me in the dim light. "Will... do you think we'll see each other before five thirty PM?"

"Umm... I'm not sure," I admitted. "Probably depends on how crazy I am trying to plan the perfect evening out."

"Right. I think I have a lunch to mid afternoon shift, actually. Eleven to three. That'll keep me busy for a little while... though if you'd like to drop by for a bite, I'd appreciate seeing you."

"Probably can be arranged," I assured her. "Gonna do any work on the literature assignment tomorrow morning?"

"I'm not sure... and I'd better get going," Liz said regretfully. "Stay sweet, baby!" And just like that, she slipped through the door and disappeared.

I drove back home, not quite sure that everything that had happened could be real. It hadn't been that long ago that I first realized I had feelings for Liz that went beyond friendship... well, when I realized that I had them _again_, I guess. And now we were dating... well, we'd had a kind of date and would definitely be having one tomorrow... though I still had to decide what kind of event it would be. And, even though Liz had been caught by surprise at the start, she seemed to definitely be warming up to the idea of a love connection with yours truly.

I was looking forward to laying my head on the pillow, though I wasn't, as usual, hoping for sweet dreams. The daylight tomorrow would be sweet enough.

#

Now, I'm gonna need you guys to bear with me a bit here, because the next important bit of the story is some stuff that I wasn't there for in person. I think I've got most of the details right, even some of the dialog, and the rest you can call author's license. So, with that, we now switch from first person narration by me, Alex Whitman, to third person. I!ve tried writing it over a couple different times in several formats, and settled on a kind of transcript that'll hopefully be clear to follow.

Oh, and there probably won't be any other notices like this afterwards. But you'll be able to tell where I come back into the action of course.

ACW.

Ring-ring. Ring-ring.

Liz: Yeah, uh, I'm here!

Maria: (after a brief pause.) Hi there... you sound a little weird or something.

Liz: Oh, it's probably just shortness of breath. Umm, from running up the stairs so quickly.

Maria: Uhh-huh. Well, okay. How's your spring break been so far?

Liz: Okay. Actually, really good, come to think of it. And yours?

Maria: Well, nothing special I suppose. Lot of long hours on my feet taking orders, and spending some nice time over at Spaceboy's place.

Liz: Cool! Glad to hear that the two of you are getting along.

Maria: Well, i isn't entirely sunshine and roses, but then I guess I'd be bored if that was all. Michael and me, we kinduv have the 'fighting for the passion of making up' thing goin' on lately.

Liz: (laughing softly.) It's not as bad as you make it sound. Unless you've changed, or do the worst of bickering hidden away out of sight.

Maria: Mmm, I'm not saying anything more about _that_. But... was there something **surprisingly** good about your weekend?

Liz: Umm... why do you ask?

Maria: That's hedging the question, and I'm not a big fan of hedging. But... well, you said that spring break so far had been 'really good, come to think of it.' If it had only been good in the usual ways, I don't suppose you'd have had to get asked the question to realize it.

Liz: True enough, I guess. Okay, yeah, something a little surprising has happened... something that I'm really excited about.

(For several seconds, no-one spoke.)

Maria: So? Are you expecting me to g... oh, wow, you met a guy?

Liz: (giggling softly again.) No. There's a guy in the picture, but not one that I met this weekend. A guy that both of us know very well, actually.

Maria: Okay, give me a minute... Max? You and Max hooked up-

Liz: No, Maria, it's not Max, and not Kyle Valenti either, in case you'd hit the other usual suspect. Does that narrow the field enough, or will I have to name names? 'Cause that would be a little weird somehow.

Maria: Umm, okay, gimme a second here... not Michael I should hope so - Alex? You... what exactly _did_ happen between you and Alex? That's who you're talking about, right?

Liz: Yes, yes, of course it's Alex. Well, not 'of course' I guess... sorry if I made you jump through hoops there. As far as just what happened... well, it's kinduv a long story, and I'm tired. Mind if I try to put together a Cliff notes version?

Maria: Sure, by all means Cliff me up! I'll get the play by play some other day.

Liz: Um, alright. Well... it started with us meeting up in the woods yesterday. He was practicing a song, and I'd come up to go for a swim in the waterfall pool. We... um, we both ended up going in to swim - he stripped down to his underwear. And we spent a lot of time together since then... playing games out in the woods, talking, seeing that new movie. Working on our psycho English teacher's spring break assignment, grabbing a snack in the Crash, watching tv together, a little picnic out in the woods. That kind of thing.

Maria: Okay, yeah, that sets the scene pretty well. Is there more? Did one of you actually make a move?

Liz: (Giggled again.) Alex did... did he **ever** make a move. Though, actually, maybe I was leading him on without consciously realizing it. We were up at the campsite in the woods, and I dared him into stripping down to his underwear for a swim again... and I did it myself! Still not sure about that... maybe I realized that he'd been flirting with me on a low-key level, and checking me out when he thought I wasn't looking... and it was just nice to be appreciated by someone that I didn't have enormous baggage with. A little ego boost, you know? But, once we were both in the water - bam, he lays it all out on the line.

Maria: (whistled softly.) Wow... a guy who can actually come straight out and admit he likes a girl without playing head games. Hmm... yeah, I suppose if there's one in Roswell, it'd be Alex. So, umm... do I get details? If it happened while the two of you were swimming... could be romantic. Would you say it was romantic?

Liz: Umm... pretty romantic, yeah. I noticed something odd once we were out deep enough that I couldn't touch the bottom, and asked him if there was something he wanted to say. And then... well, he took a little while to get his thoughts organized, or up his courage or whatever, and then he told me that he was falling in love with me. I was a little surprised, and we both may have babbled for a bit... he managed to let slip that he had a crush on me last year, like around the time of the whole blood switch thing.

Maria: Actually, I think I knew that. You didn't know that? Well... sorry. If I'd realized that you hadn't clued in, I might have said something. But it didn't seem to be important.

Liz: Umm... it'd have been appreciated, I think. Would always like to know if one of my best friends has a thing for me. But **anyways**... finally I told him that... that I wanted to try dating, or something like that. I mean... he's a great guy, and we already know each other pretty well, and I think it could work out great. And we kissed for the first time, there in the water.

Maria: Oooh! Smoochage. First off, how was it, and... if it's alright to ask, how does he compare to Max? Second... were there any other kiss times so far?

Liz: _Maria_!

Maria: Excuse me! Inquiring minds wanna know.

Liz: (Sighed.) Well... the easier question first, yes, he kissed me goodnight just a few minutes ago. That's the **real** reason I was out of breath when I picked up the phone. The two of them is it so far.

Maria: Awww... sorry, that's so cute somehow.

Liz: As far as the comparison... well, I don't want to get into it too much tonight. Kissing Max was... was something that wasn't quite like anything else, and I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to get over him soon, even if things work out okay with Alex. But... getting kissed by Alex was **very** good.

Maria: Um, okay. Oh, speaking of... well, what's my protocol on this news? Am I supposed to keep this secret, or not so much, or what?

Liz: Up... up to you, I suppose. We talked about that... we're not trying to sneak around, but don't mean to push it in anybody's faces either. Having you spread word over the grapevine might not be so bad a way of having certain people find out.

Maria: Yeah, right! In other words, 'go ahead, do our duty work for us.' They still shoot messengers, don't they?

Liz: Umm... not the people you'd be telling... well, not in anything like a literal sense. If you don't _want_ to tell anybody, then...

Maria: Nah, nah. I'll let Mikey know anyway, pass the buck that far. He can figure out what to do with the info then.

Liz: Okay... thanks - I think. Anything else?

Maria: Nah, not really. Umm... maybe we can double date sometime?

Liz: (Laughed.) Probably, but we haven't even had a maiden voyage yet... just a little dessert stop that was just about good enough for training wheels. Alex is hoping to pull off something really fancy for the two of us, tomorrow night, I think.

Maria: Then you'd probably get your beauty sleep, hee hee. G'night?

Liz: See you soon, babe.

Maria: Oh, and I almost forgot... I'm wishing the best possible luck on both of you. And glad to hear you had a nice day.

Liz: Thanks. That means a lot to me.

Click.

#

(Michael burst through the front door of the Evans house so suddenly he had to have charged it at a dead run. He spotted Izzy, sitting on the couch, wearing pajamas and a fuzzy dressing gown.)

Michael: Isabel!

Izzy: What the hell?

Michael: Um, ran... ran right over here. Not - not sure if that was such a good idea. Sorry, I'm a lit- little bit short of breath.

Izzy: Groaa-an. Alright, come on. (She helped him to a seat in her father's armchair.)

Max: (as he entered from the hall.) What's going... Michael?

Michael: (waving slightly.) Yo.

Izzy: What on earth made you rush over here like that? (Pause.) It's not... is someone hurt?

Max: (joining in.) Are we under attack?

Michael: No, no, nothing sensible like that. (voice dropped to a whisper briefly.) If it was evil aliens, I'd damn well have told you so by now. No, I'm feeling a little embarassed now, but... well, it's about your exes.

Isabel: _Our_ exes? As in... as in both Max's and...

Max: Liz... Liz, and - and Alex? (Shooting a look over at Isabel.) What about them?

Michael: (Blushes fiercely.) I'm... I'm not quite sure how to put this. They kissed.

Isabel: **What?**

Michael: And apparently they're going to be dating. (Shifted uncomfortably.) Sorry for all the melodrama, I just... I thought you'd want to know. I'd have wanted to know, if Maria and I weren't together and she was hooking up with someone else, so...

Max: (Made a face.) Yeah, I can understand that... though I... to the extent that I was expecting anything when you rushed in here, it wasn't **that.**

Isabel: (Shifted closer to Max and put a hand on his shoulder.) Are you... are you okay, Max?

Max: Once... once, I was so determined to be the guy for Liz, as long as she lives. (Looked up and around the room.) Now... now, I guess I just want her to be happy.

#

(Morning. A knock on the window. A pile of blankets sits up on the bed, and after several seconds of scrambling Liz's head pokes out. She looks around, sees a familiar figure out on the balcony, and gets up, wearing a short sleeved top and sweat pants.)

Liz: (Opening the window.) Morning, Max. Was wondering how soon I'd be hearing from you.

Max: Alright, I guess it wasn't too much of a surprise that I'd be coming by soon. Mind if I come in?

Liz: (Considered that for a moment.) Umm... actually, is the weather as nice out there as it looks?

Max: Not entirely sure what it looks like, but yeah, pretty nice. (He stepped back and let Liz climb out. She went to the edge and looked down for a moment.) Okay... you and Alex?

Liz: Yes, Max. Alex and me. (She sighed.) I... I didn't plan for this definitely, and if you're about to... to ask me why I can be with him and not with you, what he has that you don't... then I'm not sure if I have an answer that would make sense.

Max: I'm not sure what I want to say, but that isn't it. (Liz looked at him in surprise.) Not quite sure what you would have picked, but I can see a lot that Alex has that I don't have. A life uncomplicated with a nebulous uncertain destiny and a slightly obsessive past-ex-wife. A genome that's completely normal and human... like yours.

Liz: I'm not so sure that _mine_ is completely human anymore... since you saved my life. (She sighed.) But yes, the rest of that kind of makes sense. With Alex, maybe I can get away from being starcrossed.

Max: And so Juliet finds a passionate young man from the Capulet side of town. And... and she's really swept off her feet by him, isn't... isn't she? Not just a pale substitute for what she felt for Romeo, but a love just as deep and considerably less tragic. (He swallowed hard.) Not exactly the same, but neither inferior...

Liz: Maybe... I dunno. Juliet isn't in love with... with Alexander yet. She's learned her lessons, maybe, and doesn't speak to strangers so boldly in the dance hall, of deep devotion and the palmer's kiss. (Max chuckled.) But she isn't holding on to Romeo in her heart anymore.

Max: Well, then I hope she... oh, hang the analogy. (He stepped close to Liz and took her hand in his.) I hope you find your happiness, your true love. If it's meant to be with Alex, then it'll be with Alex. Treat him well, and insist on being treated well. By him, and by yourself.

Liz: (chuckling slightly, and her eyes tearing up slightly.) Than... thank you, Max. All of that same... same stuff, goes from me to you too. If you and Tess... (Max started to object, and she help up a hand to silence him.) I don't want to hear the same old excuses. It's none of my business, really, it's between the two of you now... and Kyle, if he really wants to get in the game. If Tess is really the one for you, then you won't need me to tell you about it, and you don't need to explain anything to me or get my permission. And if she isn't, then you'll find that out for sure if you stop holding on to me in your heart, and maybe you'll meet someone new. Never bet against Kismet, Max... it'll always win in the end. If only because it keeps the deck hidden from the rest of us, and stacks the cards when it has to.

Max: Liz, you're kinduv babbling a bit. (Liz nodded.) But... but thank you. I'll do my best... and I should probably go now. (Sighing.) Might... could I kiss you one last time?

Liz: Umm... yeah, I think that'd be okay. (Pause.) But no french, okay?

(They both laughed, a little nervously, and Max stepped close and kissed her on the lips.)

Liz: Err, uh, yeah. Hemmm... see you around sometime?

Max: I won't be far.

(He climbed down the ladder. Liz watched him go, then went back into her room.)


	4. Chapter 4

Okay, I think I've finished off with the 'other people stuff' for a while, and we're back to me. Woke up Monday morning, the first official day of spring break, as opposed to the weekend before spring break. Pretty much laughed out loud when I remembered what had happened the night before and who I'd kissed. Went through the usual stuff... showered, shaved, dressed, made small talk conversation with my mom over the breakfast table... (she cooked french toast, so I got some of the fancy breakfast stuff that I'd been wanting yesterday morn,) and finally settled down to the big question.

What on earth could I do for my first real date with Liz?

A movie was nearly right out the window, because of the embarassment of watching 'Against the rules' together saturday night. Fancy dinner? Not sure about that... for one thing, it would absolutely wipe out my savings even if I **could** afford it, and I'd have to let Liz know that she couldn't order the stuff on the pricier half of the menu. (If the menus at those romantic french places even _have_ prices... I've heard stories about places that don't list dollar values.) Also, well... Liz has talked to me about a few fancy dinner dates that she's been on, one of them the blind date with Doug Shellow, and one time that Max took her to a ritzy romantic Italian place in Santa Fe, not long after they hooked up last fall... well, basically, she doesn't think it's really that good a venue for a 'getting to know you' type date. Maybe worth some of the money later on, once the two people are comfortable being a couple, but I'm almost certain that we're not there yet.

I agonized about the choices, not really finding any of them suitable, for around an hour and a half, and finally decided that I had to get out of the house. Grabbed my car keys and was nearly all the way downtown before I realized that I wasn't quite sure where I was going. Part of me wanted to go and say good morning to Liz, but then another part of me didn't want to see her until I'd got some sort of a plan for tonight. Also, she'd probably be in or around the Crashdown - at least that was the only place I knew to look for her, and I wasn't sure who else would be hanging around there, or if I'd be ready for what awaited me.

So I ended up parking a few blocks away, and just kind of wandering around downtown Roswell, not heading anywhere in particular. About a block east of the UFO center, I saw Tess walking south down Virginia avenue. She noticed me and waved, which actually surprised me a little bit, and I crossed the street, wondering if she'd stay and wait for me or continue on. She hung around.

"Umm... er, hey, happy Spring Break," I said, since I couldn't really think of another opening. "What's up?"

"Not much, just taking a walk to clear my head," Tess admitted. "Everybody seems to be talking about **you**, though, Alex Whitman."

"_Everybody_?" That came out a lot louder than I'd have liked.

"Erm. Well, everyone in our little circle at least." Oooh... that was exactly what I'd been afraid of.

"So, uhh, what's your take on it anyway, Tess?" I asked her, doing my best to smile in a carefree manner. It crossed my mind that Tess might be supportive for entirely selfish reasons, just as I'd felt something of the same sort in reverse before, yesterday. With me taking Liz off the market, (at least, I hoped that was what I was doing,) Tess might have more of a chance to make a real impression on Max, like she'd wanted to for ages.

But something about Tess' reaction took me off guard. She got a very abstracted, musing look on her face for a long moment and made a little nod. "I... I think it was a very inspiring example you set, Alex," she said in a whisper. "To confess your feelings for someone who had no idea that you liked her, someone who you weren't sure would like you back... laying everything on the line."

"Umm, well, thanks," I muttered, kind of uncomfortable with her words. One thing that I had decided, though... I wanted to go to the Crashdown, to face the music if there was really any to be faced there, and to see Liz and say good morning to her. "I'm, uhh, I'm gonna head off," I mentioned, pointing west. Tess nodded, and continued on her own way. I crossed the street again.

I looked around from the front door of the cafe dining room, and my resolve almost broke. Isabel was sitting at one of the far booths, and Max, Michael, and Maria were all gathered around a square table and chatting and eating brunch. Maria had her waitress' uniform on, but somehow I doubted that she had actually checked on a customer in nearly three quarters of an hour or more. And all four of them started to stare at me, one by one. (I wondered where Kyle was, for a single slightly strange instant.)

And then Maria waved to me, and called out, not too loud but clearly enough. "Hey, Bass-man. How was your weekend?" Michael snickered slightly, then after a moment tried to straighten his face and keep it straight.

"Umm... more than a little weird," I mumbled, stepping closer. "But not at all bad. Have you got room for one more?" I kicked slightly at the fourth chair, the only unoccupied one at the table, and looked up at Max meaningfully. It was completely obvious, I hoped, that I wasn't talking about physical room, which there was obviously enough of, but emotional space. Max might not want to be around me, and I wasn't at all sure if I wanted to spend much time with him. But I kind of did want to spend a little time with Maria and Michael, since they apparently knew the score and were being fairly cool about it.

Michael turned to look at Max too, while Maria kept looking up at me for a second, and then her eyes flicked over to Michael and then nowhere in particular. "Umm, yeah, looks like it I guess," Max mumbled, his voice sounding a little uncertain but still friendly. "Sit down, have some toast or something." As I say, he passed over a little plate with what looked like three half-slices of cinnamon toast, cut along the diagonal line. Out of habit, I looked for a bottle of tabasco, and there it was, near the corner of the table between Max and Michael. I took a slice of the toast, and poured a little honey on it because I felt like something sticky and sweet.

"Mmmm." The toast was tasty, but it made my mouth water... what did I want to drink? Coffee, or some kind of pop maybe? Or juice? Well, I'd worry about that when I saw someone I could order from - which didn't really include Maria until she offered or I saw her go to another table. "So, umm... I guess all you guys have heard something about Liz and I."

"Oh, yeah," Michael chimed in.

"Most of the details, as of this morning," Maria agreed. "I admit it kind of took me by surprise... all of us, actually." She made a gesture big enough to include Isabel, across the room, and maybe one or two people even further away. "Didn't know you felt that way about her... well, at least, not anymore."

Michael blinked at that. "What... you know that he **used** to have a crush on her?"

She grinned back at him. "Yup. Ancient history... well, from back before you and I were having real conversations anyway." Hmm... I'd wondered if Maria had picked up on my crush on Liz back then - I guess I had my answer now. "Didn't think it was important enough to mention, I admit."

"I... I see," Max mumbled. Was he starting to realize that I had liked Liz back when she was first getting to know him, that I'd been jealous of him then? "Well, umm... Liz and I had a talk, Alex. Not... I don't think I'm going to tell you what we talked about, though she can fill you in later if she wants." He sighed. "And I suppose giving you two 'treat her right or I'll kick your ass' talks in as many years, about different girls, would be pushing it, huh?"

I laughed nervously. "Just maybe." I could still remember the lunch hour that Max had apparently decided it was his brotherly duty to give me 'the talk' about Isabel... somewhat embarassingly because Izzy herself was still keeping me at, well, at forearm's length at least. But I'd meant the things that I promised Max that time, and done my best to live up to them later. If he really wanted to go over some of the same territory with Liz, I wouldn't put up a fuss. To a certain extent, she deserved her own 'talk', and didn't have a brother to give me one.

But Max let it drop; maybe he felt less certain about giving the spiel in an ex-boyfriend-ly capacity, which I could understand. Around that point a waitress came around, so I asked for a Martian mudslide, which is a kind of iced coffee-and-cream, really tasty... and two Altair muffins. Michael jumped into the conversational gap, talking about this old car he was hoping to buy and fix up. Michael doesn't usually strike me as a gearhead, but I can understand how he'd feel the need for wheels other than that old bike of his... or borrowing the Jetta from Maria and her mom. Mostly I appreciated the change of subject from Liz and I... thought about mentioning the Kyle garage job thing, but in the end I decided that I'd better at least touch base with Kyle first.

When I was done with my brunch, it was maybe ten minutes to eleven, not quite, and I suspected that Liz would be upstairs and getting ready for her shift. I excused myself and headed into the back, wanting to tell her good morning before she came down and clocked in. When I knocked on the door, Mrs Parker was the one to call 'come in.'

"Oh, hello Alex... what's up? Did you know that Liz'll be starting down in the dining room in just a few minutes?"

I smiled. "Umm, yeah, actually, I did. Just wanted to talk to her for a moment first, if that's okay."

Mrs Parker got an odd look on her face. "Alex?" That was Liz's voice, from behind the door to her room. "Mom, could you send him in? I'm almost ready."

The look just got odder, but she waved me on, and I tried to keep from rushing as I went over to Liz's door, trying to figure out what she expected. If Liz really was ready for company, then why hadn't she come out of the room herself? A possible answer occured to me - she wanted to steal a moment with me in privacy, away from her mother... (and I definitely shared the sense of not wanting Liz's parents to realize that we were an item very soon.) Was that it?

She was wearing her uniform already. I hadn't realized that Liz ever got changed up here in her own room before heading downstairs for work, though of course it made a lot of sense, and I wasn't particularly aware of her habits in connection with her waitress gig. She even had the alien antennae in her hair for a second after I opened the door, and then she had pulled them out and put them aside for some reason. It was an odd sensation at first. Liz was still Liz, of course; she was gorgeous in anything, and everything that I'd been starting to feel for her over the past few days was still there. But there was also a bit of guilty awkwardness about feeling those things while looking at her in uniform, and I couldn't really put my finger on why that should be. Maybe I associated Liz in the uniform more strongly with 'Max's girlfriend' than Liz in street clothes, or Liz in a swimsuit? That might be it. On the other hand, I didn't want to let that become a stumbling block for the two of us. I'd probably be seeing her in her uniform a lot, especially after Spring Break ended, and I didn't want to have to tell her she had to avoid it or something. So I did my best to put it out of my mind, as I stepped inside, and the surprising thing was that that pretty much worked.

"Good morning," I whispered, closing the door. "How... how did your night go?"

"Umm... pretty good," she said, doing that looking-down-slightly, eyelashes-aflutter thing that most girls are so good at somehow. "Waking up... was a little unusual, but, umm. Err, well, the thing is..."

I interrupted with an intuitive guess. "Max was here when you woke up?" Liz nodded. "He wanted to talk to you about things, get a little closure maybe?"

Liz smiled. "Yeah, I guess that was it. How did you... did you run into Max?"

"Yeah, I had a bite to eat with him, Maria, and Michael downstairs," I told her. "He gave me a hint of the 'if you break her heart, I'll break your face' routine without actually saying it straight out."

Liz giggled slightly, and then her face fell. "Wait a second, you've been around... just how long exactly, without coming up to say good morning to me first thing?"

I froze for a long moment, then shook my head slightly. "Wait a second, why is it all on me? I mean, yeah, you didn't know that I was coming downtown or when exactly... but you could have called me this morning once Max left. Why can't I just get mad at you for not doing that?" Liz shook her head and started giving me a serious example of the wounded puppy-dog eyes. "I... I was trying to play it cool and not crowd you. Is that not okay?"

Liz kept the P-D-E look up for a few more seconds, and then let it dissolve into laughter. "Sorry, sorry, I know I shouldn't have yanked at your chain like that Alex, but you're too easy! Of course I don't care if you sit down and have some breakfast with our other friends before you come to see me... if you want to. If you'd wanted to come up here first, then I'd have loved that too, and I wouldn't have thought that you weren't cool and I wouldn't have gotten upset that you were crowding me." She stepped close and smiled. "I want to do this right, which suggests 'no mind games.' Sound good?"

"It sounds excellent," I said, and looked deeply into her eyes. "Good morning, darling." Liz laughed softly, just once, and we kissed. Not a long kiss, but very tender and sweet.

"Okay, umm, I'd better get down there. You gonna hang out some more?"

I thought about it. "Not... not right now. Few things I want to do." Like see if I could track down Kyle, and try out a few more ideas for the date tonight. "But I'll come by for lunch around one-thirty, and hang then. Sound cool?"

"Sounds great."

#

Go down to the amusement park in Carlsbad? No, darnit, that didn't even open until the last week in April. Umm... dancing? Eesh, seemed a little, um, a little intimate for a first date, or something. Plus, if Liz sees me out on the dance floor, it might be enough to sink this thing before it even gets started.

Oh, sorry... guess I need to catch you up on things quickly. I found Kyle... he had the morning off and was just kind of lying around the house. Apparently they found someone to fill the job opening yesterday in the late afternoon... a college student in the Kinesiology department... (ie, a jock.)

Also, it looked like Kyle had **not** heard about Liz and I until I got there... which surprised me, I would have thought that Tess would have told him. But, well, I thought that he was being too cagey with me, and said it straight out, and that's when I realized that he genuinely hadn't known, and he asked me a reasonably big bunch of questions. To give Kyle credit, he didn't give me any hassle, which he probably could have in some way since he was one of Liz's exes too, and a fairly good friend. He wished me all the best luck, and tried brainstorming first date ideas, but I didn't really like any of the ones that he was suggesting, so I headed back to the Crashdown a bit early for the late lunch that I told Liz I'd come for.

And kept on brainstorming date ideas and throwing them out, all through lunch... which was what I was doing up a few paragraphs ago before I realized that I had other things to tell you about. Lunch had come and gone, and it wasn't terribly long until three PM. I hadn't come up with anything closely resembling a date idea that I liked, and was driving myself crazy in the meantime. When I turned around and realized that Liz had gone into the back, I got up before even realizing what I was doing, and followed her.

"We'll have to put the big first date off," I blurted out.

"What, do you have other plans?" Liz shot back. And then her face fell. "Oh, no... don't tell me something happened and one of your parents got hurt?"

"Umm... no, nothing like that." I groaned. "And now it sounds really silly to say, but I've been trying to come up with the perfect evening all day, and getting absolutely nowhere."

Liz thought about it. "Okay... so maybe we do something that isn't quite perfect. That's kinduv overrated anyway, you ask me. I'm not going to reschedule just because you're getting too picky, though. Not gonna happen at all!"

I laughed at the way she'd put that. "Okay... so do you want to make a suggestion then?" Pause. "Umm, it doesn't have to be right now, and I didn't mean to put you on the spot or anything, but..."

"No, I think I've got what might be an idea." Liz said. "If you want to hear it."

"Um, fire away."

"Okay. Well, first, meet back here at five, and go out for a walk-n-talk. Just traipse about the city streets for a while, going nowhere in particular. I realize that on one level we already know each other pretty well, but there's a lot that we'd never have thought of telling each other before this, and I want to share it all."

I smiled. "That... that fits. It's... well, no, it's not perfect, even conspicuously imperfect. But it fits for us, and it sounds really fun." Liz grinned back at me. "That was first... what's the next?"

"Head up to Cow Patties and listen to some music," Liz added. "You told me that that alt country group was playing there tonight and tomorrow night, the one with Markos' older brother in it. Sounds like it could be a fun thing to check out, and we can grab some munchies while we're there." I nodded, smiling again. "Then... then back to your place for a little dessert... both in the literal and vaguely metaphorical sense."

"Wow... you really know how to pull a great date out from up your sleeve," I joked. "Should have left it up to you from the start."

"Nah... you're really cute when you're stressing out about trying to work everything out just right," she teased. "I wouldn't want to have missed seeing that I think."

"Okay, umm... I think I'm gonna chill out here for a bit longer," I said. "Actually brought some of that stupid English lit assignment in my car, so I might go and work on it in the booth."

Liz smiled at me. "Chill away. I'll come keep you company for a bit once my shift is up, and then I've got a few errands I promised my mom that I'd run, and preparations that need to be made before five o'clock." She smiled. "Wanna look my best."

"Like you could ever be less than 'transcendentally gorgeous,'" I told her. (Yes, I really did. I know the line sounds really cheesy, especially when you write it down, but I think I managed to pull it off reasonably well.)

"Maybe... yeah," Liz quipped, striking a pose. "But I can go beyond that, if I try **really** hard."

#

And I'd have been hard pressed to argue that Liz hadn't reached 'beyond transcendence', when I met her in the parking lot at five o'clock. Whoops, need to play catchup again, sorry. I guess I'm getting too used to telling the story slightly out of order.

Well, how much can I say that's at all interesting about my poetry assignment? Got a few pages of handwritten draft done, which was a little bit better than I'd expected, and didn't wear myself out too badly coming up with them. Once Liz had finished working and sat down in the booth across from me, I couldn't concentrate on the poems much, and we played a little more 'sprouts' back and forth, experimenting with starting patterns of four dots, trying Liz's veto rules one way and another. And we got into a big discussion about what might happen, say, if there was only one move left, just two live dots within reach of each other, but the other person had a veto left. I managed to convince Liz that it simply wasn't fair to allow the vetoes to be used in such a way, because they could always be saved up for a situation like that. Liz agreed, finally, that the game could not be won directly on a veto... that if a player had literally no other move, he could still make the vetoed play.

After three games, (sorry, but I can't remember them well enough to draw them out for you like the first two,) Liz had to leave and run her errands... there was a supplier who she had to drop a cheque off to, paying for dry food supplies, and a formal complaint to file with the cleaners. I managed to get a few more paragraphs written after she'd left, then gathered up all my stuff and headed towards the front door... getting there just as Isabel came in. Quintessentially awkward moment.

"Um, hi there," I said lamely. "How's it been going?"

"Welll... not too bad," she admitted. "Um, I heard about... about you and-"

"Yeah, I guess I figured you had when Max seemed to know," I said. "And, um, well, I couldn't help noticing that Max went and found Liz, to talk about it, and you... didn't."

"You didn't come and find me, either," Izzy snapped defensively. A few of the other customers were starting to notice our encounter, and we each looked around and nodded to signal the other outside, at the same time. The spring weather outside was perfectly warm, and Isabel led the way over to a sidewalk bench not far from the cafe door. "I... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bite your head off there. Guess I'm feeling a little upset and surprised at this development." I sat down too, and Isabel looked right at me, her light brown eyes opened wide. "Is this... Is this because I was dating Grant? Some kind of... of payback, on any level?"

"Not an easy question to answer," I muttered, sighing. "No, I don't think that I was trying to give you payback, to do this in order to hurt you the way I was hurt, when you picked him. It... it might end up working out that way, but that was never my intention." Deep breath. "On the other hand... well, I'm not sure that I'd have been as open to having new feelings for Liz, if you weren't dating someone else, and if Max wasn't so visibly jealous of Kyle over Tess." I opened my mouth to say something else, but then realized that I wasn't sure what, so I shut up and waited to see if Isabel would have a reply.

She did, but it wasn't at all what I expected. "I'm breaking up with Grant tonight." She must have seen me jump with surprise. "I... I had already pretty much decided to yesterday, before... before Michael told us about... about you and Liz kissing and all that." There was a short pause. "Does that... does that change anything? Do you think there's any possibility that we could..."

"Dammit," I muttered, and Isabel got a puzzled, slightly offended look on her face, and I quickly added, "Sorry, sorry, just... that's the one thing you could have said to make this whole thing as difficult as possible - you do realize that, right?" She shrugged. "Do you... did you have a reason for what you decided... beforehand? One that you don't mind telling me?"

Isabel thought about that for a moment. "Grant... he's a great guy, I'm convinced of that. But - I was starting to realize what everybody around me has been saying, that he's not the right guy for **me**. That we're in different stages of our lives, and... well, I'm not sure that the age difference in itself is bad, but the way each of us is reacting to dating someone that different from our own age isn't ideal. I hope that he finds someone great, but I'm not Miss Right for him either."

I nodded. That had given me my cue. "Okay... I'm glad to hear that, it seems like a... like a decision that I'm proud of you for, Isabel." Sigh. "And... and I still have strong feelings for you, Isabel, feelings that are definitely as big and important as anything that I've come to feel for Liz lately. But..." Deep breath, this was the part that would be hard to say. "Grant or no Grant, Liz or no Liz, I'm not sure that I could start dating you again. Because my heart might open up to you, but I'd always be worried that you'd be looking for someone more sophisticated and handsome. Because you had nearly a year to let me in, to show me that I was a priority, and you _didn't_. And... well, under the circumstances, I'm more than a little concerned that the only reason you want me right now is because some other girl does... because you can't- Well, actually, 'because you can't have me' is overstating the case a little. Liz and I are just starting up whatever is going on between us, and I haven't made her any promises, and commitments. But you'd have to fight for me, and I think on some level that might appeal to you more than actually _being_ with me."

All of a sudden, with that, Isabel's face, which had been relatively calm throughout the rest of the speech, broke into the most wretched cast of wounded disappointment. Obviously, (in hindsight,) she had been fighting not to show how much my words were hurting her, until I shoveled on more than she could bear. I felt like quite a prick, but still pretty much resolved. The truth might hurt, but it was stuff that I still think needed to be said, and maybe Isabel would be the better off for having heard it.

"I... sorry, I have to..." Too choked up to say anything more, she lurched to her feet and hurried away from the bench, towards the front door and the parking lot. I didn't look up, so I'm not sure exactly which way she went. About a minute later, I got up myself, and headed the other way, down toward Second street. I wasn't sure what to think. Ever since I woke up that morning, I'd realized that eventually Isabel and I would have a talk about the whole situation, but somehow I hadn't expected it to go like this, with Isabel talking about dumping Grant and wanting to get back together with me. Had I been a little unfair to her? How would things play out from here on in?

After walking around for a minute, I circled around and went to the Crashdown parking lot, since my car was still there - checking first to see if Isabel was leaning against the wall or sitting inside a vehicle... maybe crying or maybe not. But I didn't see any trace of her. Either she had already driven off, or maybe she was inside the dining room. I drove back home and tried to dress myself up nice without getting too formal, made sure I was cleanly shaved, (the five o-clock shadow thing doesn't work well for me I think,) and smelling nice, and that my hair was behaving itself, and so on and so forth.

Mom caught me on the way out towards the door. "Well, you look nice, sweetie. Got plans for tonight?"

"Umm... yeah actually, mom. Gonna go listen to some music with a friend."

"Isabel's come back around?"

I almost stumbled when she said that. "Umm... mom, it's not Isabel, and I think I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't pry... at least not today."

She raised an eyebrow. "I didn't mean to 'pry.' Just curious about what's going on... but if you'd like me to leave it alone, I can leave it alone. Probably for a few days, even." I laughed. "Hope you have a great time."

"Thanks, maw." I hurried over and impulsively kissed her on the cheek before I left.

Okay, so a few minutes later I was waiting in the parking lot, and this pretty much brings us back to the point where I started the scene. (Sorry again for that looping mess.) I didn't have to wait long before Liz made an entrance through the side door of the cafe. I remember that she seemed to expect that I'd be there already... she didn't open the door tentatively and peek out, as if she weren't sure if she'd see me or not. She came through boldly and confidently, showing off just slightly.

I also remember what she was wearing, of course. An intensely red skirt, not micro-short but not terribly long either, and slim-lined with a bit of a slit up one side to give her legs a better range of motion. Dark grey shirt, kind of a thin pullover or something, not quite long enough to tuck into the waist of her skirt, which left just a tempting bit of midriff showing. (I think I groaned when I first saw that.) She was also wearing little white socks and rose mary jane sneakers, her hair was back in a slightly pooffy ponytail, (which surprised me because Liz doesn't usually have that kind of... of volume in her hair I guess - did she use something special in it?) And short dangly earrings, a simple gold chain necklace, and one ring on the index finger of her right hand, a thin gold band with a glint of red on it. Oh, and a watch on her left wrist. Small purse on a long strap, slung over one shoulder. That's pretty much everything she was wearing, or at least everything that was visible.

"Hi!" She rushed forward as soon as she saw me standing next to the car, and we hugged, and kissed a brief and sweet kiss.

"You look so absolutely amazing that I don't have the right words for it," I said, and she grinned and said that I was looking very handsome too. Side by side we walked out of the lot, and she turned left, heading north on main street, which I was happy enough to go along with.

"Hmmm..." Liz mumbled after a moment. "Maybe we need to play a bit of an icebreaker game to warm things up?"

"Well, I'm not so sure that there's a _need_," I teased her, "but if you've got an idea, then I'm up for it." Thought for a second. "Not twenty questions or I spy though... not sure why, just don't feel like either of those."

"Alright," she replied calmly. "Well, we don't have any writing surface to play Sprouts on while we walk." I nodded. "How about rock-pay... no, I was gonna say rock-paper-scissors, but didn't you have your own variation of that, that you taught Maria and I how to play?"

"Um, yeah... International." I laughed. "You want to match me on that?"

"I think it'd be fun," she said. "But I can't really remember any of the moves, or what beats what."

"I remember the order, but I'm not sure how the different moves were made with hand gestures," I said, deciding that I could probably make the hand gestures up all over again if I was careful. "Okay, well, first there's warfare, that's easy." I made a fist with one hand, the thumb above my knuckles. "And... and bureaucracy, also called politics." This was with the fingers all together, palm up. "And war beats bureaucracy."

"Yeah... that makes sense, but I'm not so sure about that signal for bureaucracy," Liz said. She mimed out doing the one-two- gesture with a closed fist, thumb inside the fist, and then going to the palm-up position. Sure enough, it required an awkward twist of the wrist that had to be telegraphed a bit early... which would make it less desirable to play.

"Hmm... that's a good point," I realized. "Okay, make bureaucracy this," and I made a pointing gesture with the topmost finger in my hand. "Like 'hey, you - follow the rules!'"

Liz tried throwing to that gesture. "Better, I think. Okay, war beats bureaucracy. What does bureaucracy beat?"

"Trade," I said, holding my hand vertically with the fingers together, as if to shake somebody's hand or take a payment. "And trade beats warfare, because it's the people who sell the weapons who always come out on top." Liz laughed. "Together, those three are known as the natural pursuits, because they all relate in the same way to the last two moves."

"Right," Liz said. "I remember some of this. All three mortal pursuits can get beaten by magic."

"By sorcery, yeah." I made a hand gesture with my palm pointing mostly downwards, fingers spread and slightly bent, in what seemed a good pose for casting a magic spell. "Sorcery can only be defeated with religion." Religion was the palm down, fingers together, in a prayerful way. "And the natural pursuits, in turn, all beat religion."

"Got it," Liz said. "In a way, the system is one cycle of three nested inside the other."

"Pretty much. Okay, ready to play?"

"Yeah. Get set... one, two..." We threw out, and Liz had gone with trade, while I'd tried sorcery. "Darnit."

"First time lucky," I said, because it really wasn't more than that. Well, I'd guessed that Liz was fairly likely to choose one of the natural pursuits first, especially since there were three different ones to choose from. Sorcery was a good move as long as your opponent was more likely to pick a natural pursuit than religion. "And again... one, two..." I laughed. This time, Liz hadn't been able to resist moving to religion, and I beat her with bureaucracy.

"Go ahead and laugh, mister president," Liz warned. "This isn't over yet." I raced to guess how she'd react this time. Pick sorcery, to beat the mortal pursuit I'd thrown? No... she wouldn't be that predictable, but she might guess that I'd expect her to do that, and throw war to beat my religion. So I threw sorcery again.

"Hah!" She'd out-thought me, or maybe just stuck with religion again figuring that it was the last thing that I'd expect. "And one-two..."

I was confused at this point, decided to throw religion myself just because I hadn't done it yet, and groaned when I saw Liz with the fist of warfare.

"And again. One, two..."

#

By the time we got up past eleventh street the game of 'International' had pretty much wrapped up... I beat Liz by two throws out of maybe forty-eight. As Liz kept walking north to twelfth street I blurted out, "Isabel asked if there was any chance we'd get back together."

Liz lost her stride, and automatically I reached out to catch her arm and try to steady her. "Umm... er, I guess I was worried about that," Liz muttered. "What did you tell her?"

"I... well, I'm not sure I want to get into the whole conversation, but the nub of it was that I said I didn't think it was likely to happen anytime soon."

Liz nodded, kept walking, and smiled a small, scared smile. "You know, we didn't say anything about exclusivity or anything... certainly not yet. You might be falling in love with me, but you're still in love with Isabel Evans... I'm pretty sure of that much. I... I wouldn't mind if you wanted to... to go out with her on alternating nights, or, god, I'm not quite sure what I..."

"First off, I kinda think you **would** mind," I said softly. "You probably wouldn't be so nervous about saying it if you weren't."

"Okay, maybe I mind," she allowed. "Emotionally. But I don't **mean** to mind, and I don't think that that should necessarily stand in the way if you decide..."

"Sssh." I swept Liz up into my arms, (which was difficult and thrilling at the same time because she had been continuing to walk even after I started the sweeping maneuver,) and kissed her soundly. "I should probably say at this point that I didn't tell Isabel no because of any obligation to you, or because of any disappointment you might feel. Though I wouldn't want to do something that gives you a negative emotional reaction like that anyway." I sighed. "It's a little hard to explain, but I made the choice because of my own feelings. Yes, I still love Isabel, and there's a part of my heart that still longs for her alone. But... but I don't want to let that get in the way of you and I figuring our own thing out, if we possibly can. I want to look forward, not back in time. At this point, there's nothing I want from Isabel Evans more than closure... and that might be a little hard to get, but I'll do what I can."

Liz smiled. "I... I think I'm happy to hear that - well, most of it. Not really the part about even a part of you longing for her alone... though I guess I shouldn't be surprised at that." She sighed. "I suppose I have a little bit of my heart that feels that way about Max, though it's settling down and shrinking bit by bit. That would be the closure thing."

I smiled a little. We arrived at twelfth street at this point, and I turned left onto it, going west. Liz followed. "Do you mind if I ask about exactly what you and Max said to each other? You didn't share many details this morning... of course, if you want to keep it private, I can understand that, but I thought I'd ask."

Liz thought about that silently for most of the block. "I could give you a little more of the dirt... but then you'll owe me - and I might or might not want to collect on the debt by hearing more about your conversation with Isabel."

"That's fair I guess."

"Um, well, okay, let's see." Liz considered. We came up to North Richardson, and she shot me a look and tentatively, nodded her head back down south. I shook my head. We could afford to go a few blocks further west before looping around, at the very least. Maybe to Washington avenue, and walk past the fifth street park. "Okay, well, he woke me up by tapping on the balcony window, we went through a few of the usual introductory stuff, well I guess you've heard, guess it wasn't a surprise, etcetera. A little bantering about whether he should come inside or I go outside, for the talk."

"Ahh. And which did you?"

"Umm... I went out, onto the balcony," she said, and looked up at me. "Yes, in my pajamas, but it wasn't... well, what I mean to say, is that I was almost certainly more covered up than I am now."

I laughed. "Wasn't trying to imply that you weren't, but okay. So what was spoken of out on the balcony?"

"Umm... he asked - no, that was me. I asked if he was wondering what you had that he didn't, and he answered in a fairly typical and self-deprecating way. And, well, we kind of slipped into a Romeo and Juliet metaphor, since that's been haunting us for ages and ages now."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Except this time... Juliet realizes that the only way to avoid tragedy is to walk away." She took a deep breath. "Inspired by this really sweet guy from the Capulet side of town. I, um, I hope you're not offended by the comparison, or..."

"No," I mumbled, uncertainly, then took a deep breath, thinking about it. "No, I really think that I can live with that."

"Alexander the Capulet." She giggled.

"But not **too** closely related to Juliet or anything."

"Oh, of course not, hehehe. Um, let's see... he wished me well, and I did the same for him, of course. And... he asked for one last kiss, which I didn't see a problem in going through with. We kissed, he went down the ladder. That's it."

"Okay, I suppose." I took a deep breath. "Think that's probably enough of rehashing the past. Maybe we can talk about the future a little?"

"Hmmm!" Liz mulled over that for a few seconds. "What about the future? Let's see... there's the rest of spring break... going back to classes. Junior prom, finals, and then the summer. Unless I've missed anything important."

"Prom," I muttered to myself, struck by what Kyle had said yesterday morning... or not said. I noticed that Liz was looking up at me with an odd expression on her face. "Umm... sorry, wasn't really meaning to say that out loud. Of course, I'd like to take you to prom, but we might be getting ahead of ourselves just a little to make plans for it yet."

"Alright. But I'll keep my dance card wide open for you," she said in a breathy, mischievous voice.

"You'd darn well better," I laughed.

Well, we had a nice long walk - through the park, south as far as Walnut street, back over to main street, and then heading back to the cafe. Along the way, I mentioned to Liz how my mom had asked me if I had a date, and mentioned Isabel, and how I'd tried to avoid giving her any details.

"Yeah, I'm not sure if I want to let my parents know that I've got something going on with you very soon, either," Liz admitted. "Not that I feel any shame or anything, just... I dunno. Already all of our friends know, and I'd just like to be able to keep a little sense of having this secret all to myself."

"You don't need to explain it to me," I said. "Come to think of it... I wonder if the other kids around and at school are going to clue in soon."

"They may be a little slow to realize," Liz pointed out. "Considering the eighth-grade incident with you and Maria."

"Oh, man." It had been in February of 1998, and some rumor started out that Maria and I were 'hooking up' in secret. The issue became the talk of Stockton junior high for several weeks, with about half our class sharing and escalating the stories... (I had been particularly embarassed by the part about how I'd supposedly licked her yoo-hie under the bleachers during the big football game with Northside... actually I'd been sitting at home all alone that night, listening to angsty rock music, and Maria had spent that night with Liz at the park.) The administration had gotten involved, and, pretty much of course, had found nothing to substantiate the rumors, and been pretty much unable to find or discipline anybody responsible for starting them.

We'd passed from the limelight of student public discussion as spring started and rumors turned to the supposed anabolic dealings of the softball team. But a few people still started talking about our supposed affair for months, until the fall, when the public opinion suddenly shifted to accept that the entire thing had been a crock, and those who had insisted most often (if not loudly) that there had to be something going on between Maria and I had gotten their fair share of teasing for 'falling for the joke,' and that had pretty much been it.

"Yeah, that might give us a little cover," I admitted. "Okay, come on - let's pick up the pace. We should head off soon, it's a pretty long drive to Cow Patty's."

"Sure," Liz agreed. As we headed up main street, I noticed some familiar faces. Maria, Kyle, and Tess were all together, in front of the cafe, and talking. Seemed like a bit of an odd group. Kyle spotted Liz, and nudged Maria, and Maria waved as we got closer.

"Hi," I said, feeling a little nervous.

"Hey there," Tess said. "Going anywhere fun?"

"Ummm... out to listen to a little music," Liz said, passing by. "Have a good evening!"

"You too," Maria replied, and Kyle made an agreeable sound. We headed through the parking lot and I opened the passenger side car door for her.

"Oooh, how chivalrous." Liz kissed me on the cheek and then sat down.

I went around, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. "Okay, I have a bit of an odd question," I said once we were on the street. "If you could change one thing about the past year and a half... what would it be?"

"Hmmm..." Liz thought about that for a long time. "All right, I have my answer, though you might not like it at first."

"Oh." Sigh. "Well, tell me anyway."

"I wouldn't have run away from Max, at the Pod chamber, when he got the message from home." Liz sighed. "It probably wouldn't have changed anything in the big picture between us... not like we'd be together now. But... but I feel ashamed of what I did, when I look back on that day. Sure, I was hurt by what I'd just seen, and I thought that letting him pursue his destiny was a good idea. But... but he'd been through so much hard stuff over the few days leading up to that moment, and it had been my strength that helped him get through it. All of that stuff he'd been through in the White room, fighting back against the Special unit. Pierce getting killed. And then he gets all of this cryptic information from a hologram, and I'm sure he'd have appreciated my help trying to figure out what it meant for him. I could have stayed around, been supportive for... for a few more days or something. It wouldn't have hurt me, much, and it would have meant so much to him." She took a long breath. "What about you?"

"I'd... I'm not sure, I admit." Thought about it. "Okay, I'm not sure if this is a definitive answer, but it's a contender. I'd go back and trust you more, in connection with the whole blood exchange thing. Yeah, I was hurt and I'd have told you so, but you'd done so much to earn my trust, and I think I didn't really give you credit for that, didn't keep in mind that you had a good head on your shoulders and if you were mixed up in all this, there _had_ to be a better reason than what I was seeing." Paused to think. "Though if I'd done that, it might have been _longer_ before you'd confided in me."

"Maybe not that long," Liz admitted. "Isabel would probably still have dreamwalked you and taken your measure, even if you hadn't been so confrontational, and... did you know that she was arguing with Max, telling him that you had a right to know, right at the same time that I was actually telling you inside the jail cells?"

I blinked. "No... neither of them ever mentioned anything about that to me."

"She was. And I'd probably have made my own pitch to Max, after a few days, even if there hadn't been all of that angst over what you might tell the Sheriff."

"Glad to hear it." I drove on for about a minute in silence. "Do you think that we'll be letting someone else into the secret soon?"

"Umm... I dunno, I never really thought about it. Like who?"

"I'm not really sure. Just wondered... somebody's parents, maybe. Max and Isabel's?"

"Well, if they tell their folks, it won't really have that much to do with us."

"Maybe not at first... they'll probably want to touch base with us and find out our reactions to the whole thing," I pointed out.


	5. Chapter 5

"Okay, yeah, this is cool," I admitted, shifting slightly in my seat, trying to find the most comfortable position. "How's your chicken?"

"Really tasty," Liz said. She'd ordered a roast chicken quarter, dark meat, with rice and garden veggies, and a coke. I'd decided to get the side ribs, hash potato, peas, and ice water. The food had arrived maybe ten minutes ago, and neither of us had said that much, wanting to get dinner done before the band came up.

But it looked like there'd be enough time that we didn't really need to hurry, and i wanted to get the conversation started up again. "This might sound like it's coming out of the blue, but have you ever thought about writing... I mean, writing for the sake of writing? Not just keeping your diary, or doing a school assignment, but... I don't know. Making up a story, or a poem, or even just an essay of your own that isn't for any particular point. Maybe a play, or a screenplay, for that matter."

"You did a pretty good job of rhyming off most of the major variants of literature we learned about in Ms Batterson's class," she pointed out. "But... well, yeah, I've thought about it I guess, but haven't actually gotten round to it, or at least, not in a few years. Not quite sure what I'd write about."

"Come on... after everything you've seen and lived through, the past two years, you don't have any ideas?"

"Well, maybe a few... but if I started writing something about, well... **teenage aliens**, don't you think someone might start to put the pieces together if they ever read it and wonder where I might have got the notion from?"

"I dunno... maybe it doesn't have to be something drawn quite so much from life." I shrugged, took another bite of food. "You... you have a real talent with words, I think, Liz. I guess you're still thinking of being a big important scientist, but I'd hate to see you let that gift go to waste."

"Hmm..." Liz thought about that. "Actually, I've got an idea for something that might make a good song lyric." Her eyes twinkled as she looked straight at me. "If I get them written down, will you help me put them to music?"

I thought about that for a second. "You've got a deal."

We finished our food and Liz took two pens out of her purse. "Okay, back to 'sprouts." She moved aside her plate, indicating a wide area on the paper placemat where we could draw. "Starting with just two sprouts, I think... one is way too simple, but two is complicated enough to be interesting and simple enough that we should be able to figure out some basics."

"Okay," I agreed. "Do you want to start?"

"No, you start," she said, drawing the dots. "No vetoes, just to start off."

I won, and then Liz started, and I won again. But I started again, and this time Liz beat me. The pattern was starting to become clear... once again, the second player had to divide the action into two regions with a perimeter between them in order to get victory. However... if the first player connected a sprout to itself, the second player could draw a line inside that loop, stranding a sprout inside. If the first player connected the two starting spouts, the second player could connect them again, thus creating essentially a long loop with four sprouts on it... the first player had to move inside or outside, and the second player could then do the opposite... couldn't he or she?

"Okay, so the question is, can the first player always win with a single veto?" Liz asked, grinning.

"Maybe... but, shh. They're about to start," I pointed out. Impulsively I got up and moved over to Liz's side of the table - she slid over to let me come in. This wouldn't have been as good while we were both eating probably, but it seemed more intimate for the after-dinner, and anyway this side of the table was the one facing the stage, so we could both get a good view. (If you're asking why I was the first one to realize that the band was setting up when I was the one facing away from it... well, I'm not entirely sure on that myself.)

They played two original songs, one a nice rockin' anthem, just slightly on the political side, and an angsty ballad about love gone wrong. Then the lead singer, who I knew had a day job in the same law firm as Isabel's dad, said that they were going to switch it up a little with a cover. The band started into a pop/rockish melody with a slightly unusual beat to it, and after a few measures, the guy began to sing.

"Well good morning, tell me how'd you sleep last night?

You're still smiling, so we musta done something right."

I looked over at Liz, and she met my gaze. I think I'd heard this song on the radio, and though I wasn't quite sure why, it seemed to fit for the two of us. A few other people were getting up to dance, and I nodded a vague invitation at her. She whispered 'yes' silently, and we got up.

"Don't feel guilty, because you turned to me last night.

You ain't done nothin' wrong...

You've just been lonely too long."

I put her arms around her and held her close, and she wrapped her embrace around my shoulders, and we started to step slowly back and forth, swaying a little.

"And I ain't done nothing wrong.

I've just been lonely too long."

That was it, of course... that was what made the song fit for the two of us. We **had** been lonely, Liz and I... she pining away for not being able to go to Max, and me bemoaning the vagaries of Isabel's affections. That desolation had been part of what pushed us together, but it wasn't all that we had going for us, not by a long shot. Not now that we'd given it a try. "I love you, Liz," I whispered, daring everything in that moment.

"I... I know," she muttered. "I think I'm falling in love."

"That'll do for now," I chuckled.

"It's only natural, when you've been too long in the dark.

To look for comfort, and to warm yourself by the fire.

We're just afraid, that we might get our fingers burnt."

"I... I want to thank you," Liz whispered. "For taking a chance on my heart like this, for having the courage to tell me how you felt..."

"But you ain't done nothin' wrong...

You've just been lonely too long.

I ain't don't nothin' wrong.

'Cause I've just been lonely too long."

The band started to play an instrumental, which I was pretty certain hadn't been in the original, but that was okay because it gave us more of a chance to talk. "I... I really don't think thanks are necessary..."

"I feel like they are," Liz insisted. "Sure... you've done very well for taking the chance I think, and that's reward enough. But me... I might have been lost amidst the Max Evans blues for a lot longer if you hadn't thrown a line and rescued me, and I'm very grateful for that. I just wanted to tell you so. It doesn't have to go any further than that."

"Alright," I said, trying to yield the point gracefully. "Maybe I should thank you for... for fielding my sudden confession so considerately, for doing what you could to keep me from feeling foolish even before you'd made up your mind what you thought about you and me. It really helped a lot."

"Why, you're very welcome for that, my darling." And right then, the band launched into bridge:

"Nothing's wrong, that can't be cured.

With a new love...

All you need is someone like me

To be sure of; to be your love..."

I giggled. "That's so right. Love is all that we need, to fix whatever's gone wrong." Liz snickered a bit, but nodded.

"I'll be waiting, standing right outside your heart.

And I'll be watching...

For the slightest sign of a spark."

I certainly hoped that Liz didn't need to be watching me too closely... I felt like my skin was practically shooting off fireworks, with her so close to me.

"And I'll be here, if you should want to turn to me.

You know, we ain't done nothin' wrong.

We've just been lonely too long.

No, we ain't done nothin' wrong

Just been lonely too long."

"Any idea how many more songs you want to stick around for?" Liz whispered into my ear.

"Heck, we could probably pay the bill for dinner and leave right now," I murmured back. "Nothing like going out on a high note." She giggled.

"Ain't done nothing wrong...

Lonely, lonely too long..."

"What about your parents?"

"They should be out at the art studio by now." My mom and dad had decided to take a course together a few months ago, and had settled on painting. "We'll have about an hour and a half alone, if we want it."

"Pay the lady, stud!" For a second I blinked in confusion, then as Liz backed away, I realized that she was talking about the waitress. I looked around for her.

#

"Okay, ummm..." I was feeling more than a little awkward after actually walking through the front door behind Liz. I'd never really taken a girl home after a date to an empty house like this. Liz must have noticed how nervous I was sounding, because she turned around to look at me, and smiled reassuringly.

"Alright, let's take this slow... we've got some time, and I admit, I'm not quite sure how far I want to go," she said. I sighed, relaxing slightly. "Umm... how about getting some literal dessert, before we move on to the metaphorical stuff?"

"I never turn down sweets," I laughed. "Especially with a pretty girl. Okay, umm... let's see, what can I offer you? There's still some chocolate wafer cookies from the last time my mom did any baking, but they're a little stale by now. Umm..." I walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and didn't see anything particularly promising. Closed the door again. The little freezer on top of the fridge only ever had ice cubes, leftover pizza, meat, and veggies in it, but... "Okay, in the downstairs freezer, there's french vanilla ice cream, chocolate ripple, some kind of cranberry yogurt I think... and about half of one of those little frozen layer cakes."

"The cake sounds good," Liz said. "With maybe a little chocolate ripple ice cream on top. I thought that the instructions on the cake box said that you weren't supposed to split them and put 'em back in the freezer, though."

I turned around at the head of the stairway that led down to the basement and laughed at her. "Yeah, that's what the box says. But my mom does it all the time... she says that the key is to chop through them with a giant cleaver without giving them any time to thaw. They never seem to be any the worse for it. "

"Hmmm." Liz smiled, and I headed down into the dark basement and came up with the box and the much larger carton of ice cream.

"Oh, wait," I mumbled. "You're supposed to thaw the cake for an hour before you eat it."

"Aww, don't worry about that," Liz pointed out. "You can thaw it in the microwave, it's easy. Hmm... let's try putting it in for a minute and a half, since it's just half a cake."

So the cake got thawed out in our nuke machine, (worked out pretty well, though I think it wasn't quite as firm afterwards as if it had been slow-thawed,) and put little spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream on top, and had a lot of fun with it. Once again, we played a match of sprouts, two starting sprouts, and after a miscue or two, agreed that there was a winning strategy for the first player with one veto, if he or she was careful.

"So, hmm..." I mumbled after pushing the sheet of paper over to the other side of the table. "You want another slice?"

Liz grinned. "If I keep having treats like this, I'm going to blow up like an inner tube, but sure, yeah. It's great like this, warm out of the microwave."

I started serving out. "Sorry, but that usual girl rhetoric about having to watch what you eat won't fly with me. I've known you for too long, Liz. You've got like the metabolism of a hummingbird or something. I still remember that time two years ago that your parents were worried you were anorexic and you actually had to work to gain five pounds so that they wouldn't ship you off to the psych ward."

Liz giggled. "That's not quite as true as it once was, but you might have a point." She sighed. "I dunno, I guess I've gotten used to saying the same things that Maria says about dessert because it lubricates our relationship. If I tell the truth about never seeming to gain weight, she gets all jealous."

"Well, you don't have to pretend in front of me."

"Now, of course, if I start talking about too much chocolate making my skin look like it was dive-bombed by Russian airplanes," Liz continued, "then that's practically the gospel truth. So..." and she carefully measured out only a little ice cream onto her second slice."

"If it's chocolate that's the problem, I could go downstairs again and fetch up the vanilla ice cream," I offered.

"That's sweet, but no... this is great." She dove into the second slice with a will, and we started talking about old days with Maria, and newer days. Apparently Michael was trying to convince Maria to come with him to this metal-rock concert in Taos, and Maria pretty much wanted to go, but she wasn't sure what to tell her mother, considering that it was a five-hour drive each way."

"Well, at least it isn't across state lines," I pointed out. "That's something that couldn't be said about some of the places that they've driven together."

"I guess you've got a point," Liz agreed.

Soon we'd finished seconds of the cake, and I put what was left of it in the fridge, and the ice-cream in the upstairs freezer. There wasn't much of it left, and maybe my parents would discover it there and finish it off, and if not I could take it back down tomorrow. "So, now we come to, erm..."

"The makeout fest portion of our evening?" Liz put in, helplessly giggling.

"Some... something like that, maybe... I mean, erm... I'd certainly like to be able to do a little more together than just a goodnight kiss. Not to push it too far, I mean, heck, I know that it's still early..."

"Well, let's set the mood and then see where it takes us," Liz agreed. Duh... I should have thought of that myself, already, rather than babbling at her like a dork. ('I feel like a dork!' - read that as if delivered in a perfect Christian Slater imitation. Actually, mine isn't quite perfect maybe, but it's pretty darn good.) So I started turning off all the lights except for a few dim ones in the living room, and then went to the stereo, trying to find some decent makeout mood music. There was actually one of my mom's Barry White CDs... was Barry White too on-the-nose, too cliche? I decided to try some Babyface.

"This is nice," Liz admitted. She had already sat down on the couch while I was futzing with the stereo, and I quickly hurried over to join her... managed to trip, almost fall, and stumble to her side.

"Th-thanks. Umm, uh."

"**Relax!**" Liz drawled out the word over barely supressed laughter. I grinned and tried to take her advice to heart. Just being around her, in a date-type setting, seemed to make me way too earnest and hyper, with comic results.

"Okay, erm..." Quickly slipped my arm around Liz's shoulder, without even needing to use the yawn maneuver, it just kind of seemed natural. That was good. "Did I tell you how lovely you look tonight?"

"Pretty much, yes," Liz shot back. "But I don't mind hearing you repeat yourself, especially under these circumstances." She was smiling just a little, and her eyes were shining softly in the dim light as she looked at me, and I felt like I couldn't wait any longer. I bent my face down slightly and kissed her on the lips. It felt a little different this time... the kiss was gentle and soft and sweet, absolutely bursting with possibilities. Liz kissed me back with more feeling than I'd seen from her yet until this moment, and brought her hands around to my back, gently pulling me towards her. I opened my eyes, our lips still locked, and brushed a little of her hair aside.

Something seemed to complicate my breathing, though, like a quarter-hiccup that was nagging at the back of my throat, so I tried to move back out of that first kiss as smoothly as possible. "How... how am I doing?" I asked her a little jokingly, and the effort of speaking cleared my throat out again nicely.

"Ohh, I've got _no_ complaints whatsoever," Liz insisted. She still had her arms around me, and seemed to stretch herself up to kiss me again. I tried taking a slightly more passive role just to see what she would do, and Liz quickly brought her sweet and soft tongue into play, maneuvering it through and between my lips so quickly that I honestly hadn't realized she was doing it until it was done. I pressed my own tongue softly against hers, and felt icy-warm shivers run all up and down my back and my limbs in response to that contact. My hair felt like it was straining up on end all over my body.

The two of us french-kissed for, umm, well, it was a little hard to judge time too well, but probably around five or six minutes, hands wandering around a little bit, mostly in safe territory - up and down arms, over shoulders and backs and around heads, lightly over my chest or at the side of her waist. Then Liz let our lips part, and started to kiss and lick the smooth skin of my neck, while her hands rubbed my chest a little harder than before, through my shirt.

I felt a little bit like I'd been tossed into a tub of steaming-hot water... not hurting, but shocked and invigorated, with sensation so intense that it seemed unfamiliar running all over my skin. "That... that's incredible," I muttered. "Oh, my god, I can hardly believe..."

I trailed away at that point, partly because it was an odd experience to speak with Liz's lips so close to my voice box on the outside of my throat... and partly because a slightly unwelcome thought had flashed through my brain. Was Liz doing this just based on instinct, or had she learned it from someone else? Had she been with Max like this, or with Kyle for that matter? Of course, I didn't really have any basis for being jealous... I'd known about her relationships with both of them before I signed up for this gig, as it were, and though I didn't know the details I knew that she had had some fairly inventive makeout sessions with both of them. But now that we were in the thick of it, thinking about her repeating herself with me was giving me a slightly icky feeling.

There was nothing for it but to push it as far out of my mind as possible and hope that it went away, I supposed. The situation wasn't entirely one-sided... I'd gone beyond chaste and pure kisses with Isabel and with Leanna, after all, and Liz might be uncomfortable with that thought, but I wasn't sure if I could say anything to reassure her about it, anything that wouldn't just make things worse. Then again, it wasn't exactly a bad situation... I had more to offer Liz, in certain ways, because I'd learned from other girls, and the same went for Liz herself.

And... and if Liz felt anything like I did, then Kyle and Max were firmly part of her past, stages that her life had to go through on the way to being here with me. That way of looking at things actually helped a lot.

Chuckling slightly, I reached out with one hand towards Liz's midsection, slipping my fingers through the bare gap at her waist and up under her shirt... not going too far, not going after breastage at this point, just softly stroking her trim belly. Liz moaned and sighed, which was definitely an interesting sensation when she was in the middle of licking my neck. "Okay, okay," I mumbled. "My turn?"

"You..." soft nibble. "You wanna take a turn?" Sucking kiss... and my elbow spasmed slightly.

"Are... are you trying to keep me happy with leaving you in the driver's seat, Miss Parker?"

"Hmmm..." She nuzzled my skin, her lips seeming to almost vibrate, and rubbed a little bit harder at one nipple through my shirt. "Now why would I ever want to do that?"

"Because you're a very generous and giving soul, and love making other people happy," I said softly. "However, that doesn't stop me from returning the favor a little. Back away."

Liz laughed, shuffled away slightly, and leaned against the middle of the couch, looking up and exposing her throat very deliberately to me as if offering herself as willing victim to a vampire. (Hmm... an idea for a little erotic role-play some other time maybe?) I grinned, shifted position, and leaned close, cupping one hand around her far shoulder and tenderly kissing the smooth skin of her neck. Liz groaned with pleasure, (which was, again, an interesting sensation given the nature of our contact,) and squirmed a little in place on the couch. I chuckled softly and began to use my lips and tongue at the same time.

We only continued necking for a little while longer before deciding, mutually and regretfully, that it was probably better to call an early end to the session rather than lose control and maybe end up going way too far. I switched the stereo to some livelier stuff to help me shake away the effects of libido awakened and then not entirely satisfied... we both used the bathroom, and had a little juice to drink, and I took a conversational chance while we were finishing the glasses of juice.

"Umm... not sure if this is such a good thing for me to be bringing up, but I was wondering slightly about, erm... baggage. Relationship baggage."

"Ah, that." Liz nodded slightly. "Probably we're going to have to talk about it sooner or later? What about it?"

"Well... umm - I didn't know what you thought about the fact that, umm, that we've each had a few other people in our hearts before, umm, coming together. And, because we've been pretty, really good friends since we were young, we each know a fair bit about each other's ex-es. I guess I wanted to reassure you that even though I can't change what happened with Isabel and with Laurie, and I don't regret my time with either of them... I don't think I felt as much for either of them as I feel for you, and I wouldn't want you to ever feel you had to compare yourself to their memories, or that you didn't measure up."

Liz blinked. "Umm... well, that's really sweet... I guess. Sorry, just taken by surprise a little bit I suppose. But... but the reassurance is appreciated... and I'll try to take it at face value, and not actually work myself into an inferiority complex by reverse psychology."

"Uh-oh. I hadn't even, umm, thought of that... that you might, err... I didn't want anything like..."

"It's okay, Alex," she insisted. "The reverse psychology thing was mostly a joke. As far as me... well, I - I'm not sure if I can honestly... well, I still have my hangups with Max I know... it may take me a little while to work through them. But I'm not comparing you to him... at least, I'm really trying not to, and it's working out rather well so far. Max is a huge part of my past, but I really do think that you're the one who's in my future that way, sweetie. If there's anything that I can do to help you from getting a complex about him... or Kyle for that matter, then just let me know."

"I think that the offer helps," I said, and really it did. Showed me where Liz's priorities were at this point. "Okay, let's go get you home?"

"Sure," she said." It was a little cold and Liz shivered slightly at she headed out to the car, still wearing only her short skirt and relatively thin shirt... (well, you know what I mean...) but the car hadn't entirely cooled down from the drive back from the roadhouse, and it was only a quick trip back to the Crashdown. Liz leaned over in the front seat of the car to kiss me goodnight before getting out.

#

I had a dream in the middle of the night, after I'd come back home. Oh, by the way, my mom and Dad were back early from their art class when I got there, so it was probably a really good thing that I'd taken Liz home early. Otherwise, it's just possible that my folks might have walked in just as we started to get to the all-out groping stage. And that would've been pretty embarassing.

Okay, the dream. Well, when it started I was getting ready to climb down into this giant fissure, a chasm, looking for treasure. Joey Potter and Pacey Witter from 'dawson's creek' were coming along, which I thought was vaguely cool but not at all strange... (you know how perception of reality gets very distorted in dreams sometimes.) So we went around, buying climbing supplies from these little green gnomes who lived giant mushroom houses... (well, giant compared to usual mushrooms, maybe two or three feet high.) And we started climbing down, but there was this critter with the body of a dragon, the wings of a bat and the head of a whiny little kid who was trying to knock us down into the chasm, and he got Pacey. Joey and I ran into a tunnel, where we found a message from Lisa Simpson telling us how to distract the critter, so with that we were able to get a lot further down, and this is about the point in the dream that Joey turned into Liz.

There was some kind of hobbit village further down in the fissure, and Liz was able to trade her earrings and get us food for dinner and a place to stay the night, and this wise old hobbit man with a beard all the way down to his toes wanted to come with us to find the treasure horde, but we couldn't get there because of a bunch of poisonous snakes, and Liz and I just managed to outrun all of the poisonous snakes to get back up to the top of the fissure, and the snakes couldn't climb the last bit of the way, and then i kissed Liz, and got really embarassed because somehow during the kiss my hand ended up right on her, erm, on her chest and I hadn't even noticed.

And that's when I woke up, (of course.)

#

"How many damn jellybeans are you going to eat?" Maria asked me in a pretend-annoyed voice. (At least I hope it was just pretending.)

I thought about that for a moment, grabbed a pen and a piece of paper that Liz and I had been playing a new game on earlier. There was a big unused space near one of the bottom corners. 'That depends...' I printed quickly in messy block capitals. Plucked a bright orange candy out of the bowl and slipped it between my lips. Maria shot me an **on-what** look, and I finished the thought. '...on how many I can fit in my mouth without swallowing.'

"Oh, cool!" Michael opined. "I can totally beat you going head to head. How many are you up to now?"

I nearly laughed, which would have sprayed soggy jellybeans over the whole table. Maria rolled her eyes long-, very-long-sufferingly.

This was tuesday afternoon of spring break, the day after Liz and I went up to Billy Ray's, and surprisingly life here in the 'I know an alien club' had pretty much returned to normal. As you could tell from that little exchange, Michael, Maria and I were hanging out together in the Crashdown, being silly and just generally having good fun. Liz had been there with us earlier, and then she had to go on shift and wait tables. (Yes, if you're curious, she saw me and Michael doing the jellybean contest, and she didn't seem to mind the inanity of it.) Max and Kyle were together in one of the booths, talking in low voices very intently, and I had to admit I was very curious what was up between them. Were they assigned to a school assignment together? Agreeing to arm wrestle over Tess? (Okay, that seems unlikely - Max isn't an arm wrestling kind of guy.) Was Kyle trying to persuade Max to give up his UFO center job and devote his alien powers to a get-rich-quick scheme that Kyle had dreamt up?

It wasn't long after that when Liz got a chance to go on break and hang out with the three of us. "This may sound odd," Maria blurted out while she was still getting settled, "but how about going on a double date sometime?"

Liz nearly fell off her chair, and I reached out a hand to steady her, smiling as I did so. "Umm... might, I dunno, might be a little soon for that," she managed. "Umm... or is it?" That was with a glance over at me.

"Umm... doesn't sound like too bad an idea, actually," I said. "I mean, yeah, we're just in the getting to know you phase, or more like... I'm not sure how to describe it, since we **do** know a lot about each other, but not in a couple-ey way." Sighed. "In any event, hanging out with you guys sometimes seems at least as good a way to spend the majority of an evening as, well, as being together just the two of us. For one evening, at least." Shot a sidelong look at Liz. "Just for a change of pace."

"Just as long as you two horndogs don't start, well, like _really_ major making out right in front of us," Liz said. "That could, umm, get awkward."

Michael grinned ruefully, and Maria sighed slightly. "Aww, what would be awkward about that?" I asked with an even bigger grin than Michael's, and nudged Liz's arm slightly. "We could just follow their lead."

Liz made a big show of rolling her eyes. "Sorry, not until we've been together for a little longer," she said primly. I sighed, and Liz started to laugh.

"Okay, how about making a road trip?" Michael suggested. "Drive out to Carlsbad and hit the caves? I know it's a little cliche, but... well, I've never actually been myself, and... er, certain people have assured me that they can be fun."

Liz looked over at Michael for a long moment. "You know, you can talk about Max and Isabel by name in front of us if you want to?"

"He can?" I asked. Yes, I was joking, and yet I didn't feel entirely comfortable with hearing their names like that so suddenly.

"Well anyway... I'll endorse the Carlsbad caverns too," Liz said. "Can I get a 'hell yeah!'?"

Maria shot me a long look, and I shrugged. Liz giggled, and evidently decided to stick to her conversational gimmick, no matter how misplaced. "Can I **get**... a _hell yeahh_?"

"Does a heck yes count?" Maria asked in a level voice without much emphasis. Liz sighed.

"Hell yeah!" I said, with a little more verve, and Michael echoed it.

"Hell what?" I looked up to match a familiar face to the familiar voice. Isabel was standing about midway between the dining room door and our table, and my jaw dropped for a moment. She was wearing this low-cut red tank top, a tight red skirt made of something slightly shiny and definitely stretchy, that clung to her curves from waist almost down to her ankles. Isabel's golden hair fell loosely past her shoulders and the tip of one lock brushed the contours of one of her breasts. She smiled, made a little facial gesture that might or might not have been a wink... it happened a little too quickly for me to be sure. And then she wiggled off to sit at the only empty booth, the one closest to the door, (where she would still be in sight of me and Liz.)

Liz shot me another sidelong look, and I sighed. If Isabel was starting some campaign to tease away my resistance to her wiles, lure me away from Liz, or sow trouble between the two of us, then the next few weeks probably wouldn't be smooth sailing. My heart was committed to Liz, but somehow I didn't think that my eyes would be easy to get on the program. Isabel was beautiful, and I was still terribly attracted to her.

But Isabel wasn't the only one who could send signals. "Hold my seat for a minute, dear?" I asked Liz in a soft whisper.

"Um, sure, but why?" she asked. "Um, I just meant, well... I was wondering-"

She wanted to know if I was going to talk to Isabel, but didn't want to ask out loud, I realized. Well, that wasn't what I had in mind.

"Rest room." And I kissed Liz on the cheek before getting up. Isabel had been watching us, I knew, but her reaction would be less certain. She was a stubborn girl, and might redouble her efforts the more I tried to focus my affection on Liz... in which case I'd have to think of something else I guess.

As I walked up to the bathrooms, I realized that Liz's father was standing in the way and looking at me with an intense, serious gaze. "Um, hello sir."

"Alex," he replied, nodding. "There's something I wanted to ask, and I think you might know what it is."

Big swallow. "Umm... are Liz and I dating now?"

He grinned a wide grin that I found disconcerting. "Yes, I think that way of putting it might do. And are you?"

"Ummm..." I took a deep breath. "Yes, we are."

"Hm." Mister Jeffrey Parker gave me a long, musing look. "Well then, Mister Whitman, we'll have to have you for dinner some day soon." I noticed the phrasing there... not invite me over to dinner... Of course, he couldn't be literally talking about eating me alive, but metaphorically? I wouldn't be too surprised.

Used the bathroom. Sat back down again, only to discover that Michael and Maria had gone over to sit opposite Isabel in the booth. "Should I ask?"

"I think Maria's taken it upon herself to be an intermediary and try to head off a possible problem," Liz said, smiling at me and brushing a little hair away from my forehead. "I wish her luck, though she may be dealing with forces too wild to easily control."

"Maybe. But I'm glad that she's trying." I took the opportunity to kiss Liz. "I think... well, your dad knows that something is up with us. He guessed, but I confirmed it."

"Hoo, boy. Guess I shouldn't be surprised that he'd catch on quick this time," Liz mumbled, and then smiled a little awkwardly at whatever look I was giving her. "I think he feels like he wasn't paying enough attention to me last year, when the whole Max/me thing was developing. But we don't need to talk any more about that now."

"Okay," I agreed, letting the subject drop. "Tonight... are you free?"

"Umm... yeah, got nothing in particular on my calendar," she giggled. "Why?"

"There's this improv comedy troupe from El Paso performing sunset in the park," I said. "One night only. We've **got** to go."

"Um, alright," Liz agreed, then cocked her head slightly. "What's 'sunset in the park'? I mean, is it the title of a play they're doing? If they're improv, do they actually do pieces that somebody has written and titled, or..."

"No, no, sorry," I chuckled. "In the park, as in that that's where they'll be performing. Sunset, as in that's when they start, when the sun hits the horizon. As far as what material they'll be doing, I don't know that. Probably they don't even know that, until it starts happening."

"Okay, cool," Liz agreed. "If they start at sunset, how long does it last?"

"Probably around an hour and a half. I'm pretty sure that they bring lighting, to cover as the twilight fades away."

"Sounds... perfect." She wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "Oooh, and we need to settle what day we're gonna try to go to Carlsbad."

"Yeah," I agreed.

There was a little ringing-bell sound from the kitchen window, and a familiar voice with a twangy spanish accent called "Parker, your break's up!" Liz smiled at me and headed off to do her duty.

Soon after that, Maria and Michael headed back. "So what's the word?" I asked them.

"Hmph, not sure," Maria mumbled as she settled back into her chair. "Isabel can definitely be stubborn."

"That's like saying, umm..." Michael picked up a jellybean and apparently swallowed it whole. "That's like saying that the desert can be sandy." Maria shrugged, not arguing the point.

"Yeah, I mean... I still like Isabel, but I think by now I'm not completely blind to her faults," I muttered. "She tried to persuade me yesterday that... well, I'm not even quite sure of what, but she was asking if she still had a chance with me. I don't think it's a coincidence that she got interested again right when she found out Liz and I had gotten involved... and I'm not sure if I'd have wanted to get back together with her even if Liz and I weren't..."

"I... I think I'd better stay out of this conversation, man," Michael disclaimed. "Isabel has been one of my best friends for all my life, and so... I guess I know her too well, **both** ways." He sighed.

"Yeah, I see your point, Alex, but I feel a little sorry for her," Maria put in. "I... well, I remember how I felt when I was worried that Michael was moving on... and I was still very much in love with him." A significant look passed between them. "Of course, that doesn't give any girl an excuse to go tarting herself up and trying to cause trouble."

"No, of course not," Michael agreed. "A girl should only ever tart herself up to spread happiness and joy." That earned him a smack from Maria... and laughs from both of us.

It's kind of funny, actually, that just when Maria had brought up girls 'getting tarted up' - well, Tess strode through the doors a moment later, and she was definitely all dressed up, in a pretty sexy way. (No, I'm not personally interested in her, got more than enough woman to keep me busy between Liz and Isabel... er, though not the way that sounds maybe. Sigh. The point is, I can still appreciate the view, yes?)

Tess' hair had been straightened out, and looked just a touch blonder than usual, which helped to giver her a dramatic look. She was wearing a black sweater with a v-neck, blue jeans that were tight enough to be a second skin, black boots, and she had a 'take no prisoners' look in her eye. (Or in her eyes? No, I only really got a good look at one eye from where I was sitting.)

She strutted up to the booth where Max was sitting, and I started to wonder what was going on? Was Tess about to make a serious play to win Max over, now that Liz was spoken for with me? What would Max's reaction to that be?

All of the gang was watching as she came up to the table... Isabel craning her neck from the edge of her own booth, Maria urging Michael none too gently to stay out of her line of sight, and Liz... Liz was behind the counter, a drink in her hand, standing motionless, eyes staring widely. I thought about going over to be near her, but... well, customers weren't generally allowed back there, and in any event, I pretty much wanted to hear what Tess would say, and I was in a good position for it right here.

Kyle, of course, was practically sitting on the stage, since he was still sitting at the same table as Max. In fact, since Tess couldn't seem to get up the courage to make eye contact with Max, it almost seemed like she was addressing both of them. "Umm, hi,."

"Hello," Max replied, and Kyle waved at her in a friendly fashion.

"Okay." Tess took a deep breath. "I, well, I realize that this might seem sudden or indiscrete or something like that, but... well, I'm taking a cue from Alex, or from what I've heard about Alex's story fifthhand. How he... urm, I mean, it seems like he mustered up a lot of courage to tell Liz exactly how he felt, even though their previous relationship didn't give him much to go on in terms of signals that she'd feel the same way. And that gamble paid off."

Uh-oh. Why was I feeling so nervous about Tess using me as a role model? (Because if she got together with Max, Liz might blame me? Would she really be looking to place blame in that situation? It was more than a little hard to tell.)

"So, anyway, here it goes," Tess muttered, and turned to look the object of her affections in the eyes. That was my first clue - she didn't turn in the direction that I had expected her to. "Kyle... you're just about my favorite person in the whole world, and I've found myself wondering if... if I might be the girl of your dreams. I like you, and I think you're really hot. Give us a chance." And with that, she stepped over towards Kyle, squeezed her limber body into the available space to sit crossways on Kyle's lap, and kissed him. He seemed startled for maybe five seconds, and then started to respond eagerly. Maria started to clap, and then stopped self-consciously.

"Well." I looked up and realized that Liz was just behind my chair. I stood up and wrapped an arm around her waist. "Looks like it's going to be a _very_ interesting Spring break."

"Umm, yeah," I said, and kissed her again, just 'cause.


End file.
